


Our Guts Can't Be Reworked

by roachpatrol



Category: Motorcity
Genre: Bodyswap, Everyone is Bisexual, F/M, Friends to Lovers, Gender Issues, Love Triangle, M/M, Mike is EXTREMELY Bisexual, Multi, Polyamory
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-06-23
Updated: 2018-10-07
Packaged: 2018-11-17 22:23:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 25,679
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11277978
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/roachpatrol/pseuds/roachpatrol
Summary: “Oh my god,” Julie says again, and paces in a little circle. Then she paces in a bigger circle, trips over a wrench, falls over, and lies on the floor in total defeat. It’s been an hour since she and Chuck got their brains or minds or souls or whatever put in each other’s bodies by a crazy old machine in some buried ruins and things haven’t improved from the initial, disastrous explosion.“Maybe we should have lunch,” Mike suggests. “And like, think about this.”“I am really tired of thinking about this already,” Chuck says grimly.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> _But I'll take your heart served up two ways_  
>  _I sing a bitter song_  
>  _I'm the lonelier version of you_  
>  _I just don't know where it went wrong..._  
>  Fall Out Boy, _Ratatat_ , feat. Courtney Love

 

“Oh my god,” Julie says. “Oh my god, ohhh my god. What are we going to _do_?”

“We’re going to have to deal with it,” Chuck says. “We’re just. We’ll deal with this. Oh my god.”

“I’m so _tall_ ,” Julie moans. “And I’m hungry again! How are you always hungry!?”

“I don’t know! It’s normal! I’m normal!”

“Chuck, you’re not normal, you’re like seven feet of eating robot and now I’m stuck with that and what if it’s forever!”

“Julie! Calm down!”

“Oh, yeah, okay, I’ll just do that!” Julie throws her hands in the air. “I’ll just freaking do that right now! Look, here I go, I am totally calm except for _your freaking endocrine system is GARBAGE_.”

“Hey,” Chuck says, and looks kind of hurt.

“Oh my _god_ ,” Julie says again, and paces in a little circle. Then she paces in a bigger circle, trips over a wrench, falls over, and lies on the floor in total defeat. It’s been an hour since she and Chuck got their brains or minds or souls or whatever put in each other’s bodies by a crazy old machine in some buried ruins and things haven’t improved from the initial, disastrous explosion.

“Maybe we should have lunch,” Mike suggests. “And like, think about this.”

“I am really tired of thinking about this already,” Chuck says grimly. He pushes his hands through his—Julie’s—his hair, messing up the smooth line of the bangs and scattering the long dark fall of his—her?—hair even further. It’s kind of all over the place right now, spread out across the back of the couch and Mike’s shoulder. Neither of them know how Julie manages to keep it all together.

“I can’t stop thinking about it!” Julie says from the floor. “Like! You’re going to have to be me now—”

“Yeah, we already said—”

“And go up and live in Deluxe! Like! A lot! Chuck, _I live in Deluxe and have a job and a dad and stuff and OH MY GOD MY DAD._ ”

This makes her curl up in a tight, horrifying ball, big knobbly hands over her pale hair, and start to wheeze. Julie never talks about her dad. Everyone knows not to ask her. There is something weird and wrong with Julie’s parent situation and she never, ever, _ever_ likes _anyone_ to even bring the subject up. Usually she just laughs kind of awkwardly and changes the subject. Right now she seems to be having one of Chuck’s weird little fits.

“Um,” Mike says. “Buddy?”

“Crap,” Chuck says, and gets off the couch very carefully.

“Can’t—” Julie gasps, “you can’t, _you can’t,_ you can’t go, Chuck, you can’t you can’t _he’ll kill you CHUCK_ , you _CAN’T—”_

“Whoah, whoah, okay, easy there,” Chuck says, kneeling down by Julie’s shivering side. He starts to rub a circle between her shoulders and Mike wonders if maybe he should have been doing that for Chuck. Only, Chuck’s never asked him to, and doesn’t even like Mike to pay any attention to him when he’s like this. Maybe Mike should be... not looking at either of them right now.

“Can’t, you can’t, you can’t,” Julie hiccups, while Chuck makes small shushing noises and just sits there with her. Instead of winding down into a tightly controlled quietness like Chuck usually does, she just—she actually—she starts sobbing, choking for air. Mike hasn’t heard that noise in a long time. It’s kind of really painful, actually, to listen to both of them, so Mike gets up and goes into the kitchen to make lunch.

 

*

 

Over food, Julie looks flushed and miserable, eyes red-rimmed when she pushes overgrown blond bangs out of them. Chuck looks deeply embarrassed, and nibbles awkwardly at the sandwiches Mike’s thrown together.

“Okay,” Julie says roughly, and frowns at her voice. “ _Okay_ ,” she says, a little higher. “We have to... figure stuff out. Make a list. Or a chart or something.”

“Mmm. Yeah, you can just hang out here and do whatever until we figure out how to fix it, but I’m gonna need a lot more info on like, whatever it is you do to... be you.” Chuck touches his red lower lip, thoughtfully, then looks at his thin pale fingertips. “Like, does this stuff come off?”

“Ha,” Julie goes, finally cracking a smile. “Yeah, there’s makeup remover in Nine Lives’ glove box. A whole kit of stuff, really. We can go over it.”

“Yippee,” Chuck says, and he sounds just like Julie, really. Mike laughs, and then feels really weird about it.  

“Maybe you can have Claire do your makeup the first couple mornings, I don’t know,” Julie says. “Is that okay? That’s probably not okay. That’s not going to be okay with Claire. She really doesn’t like yyy—crap.” She winces. “You have like no filter when you’re not all scared.”

“Tell me about it,” Chuck sighs. He frowns, folding and unfolding his hands together, apparently fascinated with the shape of them.

“She’ll be okay if I ask her really nicely,” Julie says. “And promise to owe her like a million bazillion favors forever. And you don’t get weird on her.”

“Julie, this is already peak weird,” Chuck says. He wiggles her fingers at her. “Also you have abnormally tiny hands.”

“Shut up, no I don’t!” Julie protests, voice cracking indignantly. “They’re normal hands!”

“No they are _not_! Look!” Chuck grabs Mike’s hand and—he is _really_ not used to Julie doing that, Julie’s hands pulling him around like Chuck does—and spreading his—her—fingers against his palm. Mike stares in fascination down at the cool, soft, pale skin against his. Her thin, elegantly tapered fingers barely go to his second knuckle.

“ _See_ ,” Chuck says.

“They’re normal!" Julie protests. "That’s _normal_! We’re not all freaking huge!”

Julie’s body still smells like her, too. Mike kind of wonders if that’ll change or not. It’s definitely... peak weird, like Chuck said.   

Mike says, “Hey, I wanna see—” and grabs Julie’s hand. Chuck’s hand that Julie has now. She shuts up abruptly and just _stares_.

“Oh,” she says. “Huh. Wow.” Chuck’s palm is totally familiar to Mike, warm and dry, with a slightly buzzing pulse somewhere under his skin. The long fingers flex against Mike’s as Julie stares at Chuck’s hand, the way it overlaps his at every fingertip.

“Huh,” Chuck agrees, looking at their hands together. “I guess I am kinda big. It doesn’t feel like it on the inside.”

“Really,” Julie says dryly. “Because I’m sure feeling it.” She slots her fingers through Mike’s and squeezes, head tilted curiously to one side. Mike grins and squeezes back, then plants his elbow on the table.

“Hey, come on, armwrestle—let’s see—”

“No fair,” Chuck says. “I couldn’t take you in either body—”

Mike is abruptly wrenched across the table as Julie slams his arm down, knocking plates aside, his shoulder hitting hard. He whoops in startled delight.

“I _knew_ you were holding out on me!” he crows. Julie is staring down at her hands again, starting to grin.

“Okay,” she says. “Okay, hang on, I wanna try something.”

“Julie—no, guys, come on!” Chuck says. “Uncool!” but Julie’s already sliding out of the booth, arms held out wide for balance, tripping on her own feet. She catches herself before she falls and whirls around, then grabs Mike off the table and _picks him up_.

“Oh my god,” Chuck says from the booth. “Julie! What the heck!”

“Chuck! Did you know you could do this?” Julie’s got an arm under Mike’s thighs and another under his back and is just—holding him. Up off the ground. He slings his arm over one narrow shoulder for balance but it really doesn’t look like Chuck needs—like _Julie_ needs any extra support, in this body. She actually just kinda hefts him in the air like he’s a sack of potatoes.

“Put him down, you’re gonna throw out my back or something!” Chuck yells.

“No, this feels fine. Holy crap, Chuck! This is awesome! Mike, did you know he could do this!”

“Nope,” Mike says with complete honesty.

“I wonder how long I could carry you around,” Julie says, and walks in a careful circle. “Oh man. This is crazy.”

“Put him down!” Chuck yells again.

“You’re not even frickin’ _tired!”_ Julie yells back. Then she frowns and adds, “But you’re hungry again. Huh.” She sets Mike down, gently, and then her face lights up again, completely transparent even through the overgrown hair. She’s right, Chuck has no filter.

“ _I’m gonna pick up a couch,”_ she grins.  

Julie tears through the base, laughing, electric, and she does actually pick up a couch, and then in no particular order an engine block, a shelf, an armchair, and a balloon tire. Then she sways, panting and sweaty, and goes, “Mike—? I don’t...” and sits down hard.

Chuck, who’s given up telling her to cut it out and has just been following them around, arms crossed, mouth tight, goes “ _Ha._ ”

“Uh. Buddy.” Mike sits down by Julie, and amends that to, “Jules. You... okay in there?”

“Mmnfgh,” Julie goes and flops her head down on his shoulder. “...dizzy.”

“You need to eat,” Chuck says. “And not freakin’ _overclock my systems_.”

“Izzat what it was...?”

Mike gets Julie upright and slings her arm over his shoulder. It’s familiar but strange, too, Chuck’s never put this much weight on him, or frowned in this weird, bleary, disoriented way. Back upstairs, Mike tips her into the booth and Chuck shoves a couple more sandwiches into her hands, then glares at her while she tears into them frantically.

“I guess the list I leave you is going to have to be pretty long, too,” he says. His calculating, disappointed frown is completely indistinguishable from one of Julie’s.  

 

*

 

The lists are finished, with a lot of last minute revisions and some bickering and one excruciating half-hour where they both make Mike go away to let them talk about private stuff.

But finally, they take Nine Lives and Mutt up to the northside Deluxe entrance ramp to meet Claire, Chuck in Julie’s body in Mutt’s passenger seat, hands clamped tensely around the safety harness, fussing with the strap adjustments. He’s a lot calmer in Julie’s body, watchful rather than nervous, intent on just a couple personal screens rather than frantically distracting himself with immersion into Mutt’s digital systems, and he doesn’t start screaming until at least a hundred miles per hour past his average. He completely makes up for it by being _absolutely piercing_. Before the drive, Mike doesn’t think he’d ever heard Julie actually shriek, about anything, ever, and by the end of the drive Mike is profoundly grateful for that.

“Well, at least we know you can scare the crap out of me no matter what,” Chuck says breathlessly, as he fumbles the harness open and lurches out of the car.

Nine Lives has been maintaining almost complete radio silence, though the yellow squad car has stuck faithfully to Mutt’s tail the whole way up. It rolls to a halt by the entrance ramp, powers down, and then just... sits. Mike and Chuck exchange an uneasy glance.

“I bet she’s just trying to get her knees out from under her chin,” Mike says, and elbows Chuck, who staggers. Julie hadn’t been happy about trying to squeeze Chuck’s long legs into her custom-fitted driver’s seat.

“Yeah, ha ha,” Chuck says, rolling his eyes, and elbows Mike back, who winces. _Man,_ he’s got sharp elbows now. Chuck jogs across the space, a lot less unsteady in Julie’s body than the reverse, though still noticeably less confident than Julie in her own body. Mike follows at a bit of a reserve, uncertain if he should be intruding on another... thing. Another Chuck-and-Julie private freakout thing.

Chuck’s got the driver’s side door open, by the time Mike makes up his mind to go all the way over and see, and Julie’s wrapped her long arms around Chuck's narrow back, face buried against his shoulder. She’s shaking all over, muffled little gasps and curses, and Chuck’s petting the back of her head, over and over.

“It’s okay,” he’s saying, “you’re okay, it’s okay, just breathe, you’re okay now.”

“ _Stupid—_ ” Julie gasps out, “freaking—this is—I’m so—”

“It’s okay. Breathe.”

“This is so freaking stupid Chuck, oh my god, why is it—why are you—I can’t, I can’t stop, I can’t—”

“Julie, it’s _okay_ , it just _happens_. Breathe.”

She makes a long, horrible high-pitched whimper, shudders a final time, and goes kind of limp. When Mike catches a glimpse of her face it’s wet with tears and utterly miserable and he looks away immediately.

“The longer you’re upset that you’re upset, the longer you’re upset,” Chuck says, low and private, still running his hand over Julie’s hair again and again. Her hands are fisted in the back of his vest, now, big knuckles white with tension.

“I couldn’t stop,” she mumbles. “Why...?”

Chuck shrugs. “I don’t know. It’s just like that.”

“Jeez.”

“You okay?”

“No!”

“You’re okay. Come on, get up. Have a walk.”

Julie stumbles as she unfolds out of Nine Lives, arms crossing tightly over her chest, shoulders hunched in, head hung low and defeated. Humiliated. Mike’s seen Chuck like this too many times and he really, really doesn’t like it.

“Are you gonna be good to drive back?” Chuck asks her, as they stumble kind of pointlessly around the perimeter of the entrance area.

“No. Yes. I know how. I _know_ how. It’s _MY CAR!_ ” Julie clenches her teeth around the shrill scream. “It’s _my car_ , Chuck, she’s mine! I made her, I can drive her, she’s—I have to—I _have_ to!”

“Hey. Breathe.”

“You can drive! _You_ can drive, and I can drive, so why can’t I—why—”

Julie makes a noise horribly close to a sob, scrubbing her face with the back of her wrist, but after that she breathes.

“It’s just like that, with me,” Chuck says, and his face is cold and very bleak. “I don't think you can fix it, it's just how my brain is. I’m sorry.”

When they get back to Nine Lives, Julie puts her hand on the roof.

“Mike,” she says, and Mike jumps a little.

“Yeah? Can I do—anything?”

“I’ll ride back with you. We’ll use the tow line for my car.” She runs her hand along the roof, lets it drop off. “I can figure this out in the garage. We’ll do tests. Controlled environment.”

“Okay,” Mike says. “Yeah, that sounds great. We’ll get everything figured out, Jules, don’t worry.”

Chuck makes a quiet little _hah_ , but steps back when they look at him.

“I’m gonna go,” he says. “It’s not a long walk up, right?”

“No. Maybe ten minutes. Claire’s got a rental pod to fly you back—home—with.” Her face screws up again and she shudders. “Are you going to be okay? With—everything?”

“I’ll be fine,” Chuck says. “I’ll call if I need anything.”

Julie nods. She runs her hand over her car again, then starts trudging towards Mutt as Chuck nods at Mike and sets off on his own course.

Julie starts screaming a hundred fifty miles _before_ Chuck’s average freakout speed, and then tries to grab Mike’s steering wheel.

“Whoa!” Mike yelps, elbowing her off. “Cut it out, man, stop!”

“ _SLOW THE HECK DOWN,”_ Julie yells, going for the gearstick. “ _WE’RE GOING TO DIE!”_

“We’re not going to die, we’ve never died, we’re fine,” Mike says firmly. “Chuck’s okay with this, you know!”

“HE IS NOT AND I’M NOT EITHER,” Julie yells, and tries to get his wheel again. Mike is suddenly really glad Chuck doesn’t _want_ to drive, because dealing with someone who thinks she can do better than him and really really wants to try at two hundred miles an hour is kind of an event.

“You can get back in Nine Lives if you want!” Mike lets her know.

“I WANT YOU TO SLOW THE ABSOLUTE CRAP DOWN,” Julie yells. “I AM GOING TO HAVE AN ACTUAL HEART ATTACK, MIKE! I AM ACTUALLY GOING TO FREAKING EXPLODE, RIGHT HERE, RIGHT NOW, _SLOW DOWN_.”

Frowning angrily, Mike slows down. He slows all the way to a hundred, like a granny or something. It should be a crime to drive this slow.

“You know it’s gonna take longer to get back the slower we drive, right?” he asks. “You could just close your eyes or something and we’ll be home before you know it. No problem.”

“Lots of problems,” Julie says, breathing fast and shallow. “Me. I am a whole lot of problems, right now, a lot of them, happening all at once, this is _not okay_. Slow down!”

Mike drops to ninety.

It is a very long ride home, and when they finally get to the garage, Julie gives a final, quivering whimper and then faints. Mike sighs, runs his hands through his hair, then goes and drags her off to a couch to recover.

 

*

Once Julie’s back on her feet, however unsteadily, she doesn’t seem to want to sit back down, as if she can make up for instability with momentum. Mike’s never had a problem with that kind of attitude, himself, so he does his best to keep her fed and busy and a couple hours go by pretty well. They clean the kitchen, then reorganize one of the storage rooms Mike was meaning to get to earlier, then go fix up Julie’s crash room for more regular occupancy.

“Yeah, I can’t sleep in this,” Julie says, looking around at Chuck’s bedroom. She kicks at the crumpled jeans on the floor, then a nasty-looking sock, and snorts. “I didn’t know he was a slob!”

“I make him keep it to his room,” MIke says. The mess in here makes his fingers itch to start folding, but Chuck would know it was him who did it, so he just sort of stands there with his hands in his pockets while Julie raids the Probably Clean Pile for a couple pairs of jeans and shirts and, uh, yeah, that’s underwear, Julie is now touching Chuck’s underwear, this is weird. She folds them herself and drops them on top of a couple pillows, then scoops an armful of miscellaneous computer parts into a box and adds that too.

“I like to work on stuff before bed,” she explains to Mike. “Or like if I’m up at night. You know it’s nice to keep busy, when, uh...”

“I know,” Mike says. But he didn’t know Julie got nightmares too. He should have. He pats her back, and she jumps a little, then smiles at him hesitantly.

Julie’s room is mostly a workroom, with a quilt thrown over an old loveseat in the corner on the rare occasions Julie overnights somewhere in the base besides a recovery room cot or a rec room sofa. Julie drops Chuck’s pillows on the loveseat, then seems to do a doubletake. She looks back over her shoulder at Mike and grins, pointing.

“Oh man,” she says. “I _am_ small. Mike, what the _heck_ , look at that! How did I ever fit on that, it’s like a little dollhouse bed!”

Mike shrugs and grins back. “You’re a sports model,” he says. “We can’t all be, like, stretch limos.”

“Pfff. I’m gonna go steal Chuck’s cot.”

“Need help—?”

“Don’t you dare. I love this crap.” She dashes out the door, and when she’s back in a couple minutes, she’s breathing hard but carrying the whole bedframe and mattress and everything by herself, grinning from ear to ear. She drops it with a resounding _clang!_ perpendicular to the loveseat, then flops onto it and stretches out, long arms thrown up over her head, blond hair going everywhere.

“This is so cool,” she says. “Why doesn’t he throw stuff around like all the time? It’s _so cool_.”

“It’s pretty fun to watch,” Mike admits. “I guess he’s just kind of a modest guy.”

“It’s always the superheroes that are all modest,” Julie says casually. “If I were like you guys I’d brag nonstop.”

“You are, though,” Mike says, surprised.

Julie points casually at the loveseat. “Sports model, Mike.”

“Size doesn’t matter!” Mike protests, and she giggles. “Hey, shut up, I mean—you know what I mean!”

“Yeah, I know. You’re sweet.” Julie sits up, rubs the back of her neck. “I do my best, I guess. I’ve been keeping up with you all just fine. Right?” She sounds like she’s trying to be flippant, but Mike knows that stressed edge to Chuck’s voice a little too well.

He puts his hands on her shoulders. “Julie, we’d all be dead without you. Like, a lot. You’re important.”   

She looks up at him, smiling a familiar, painful smile, one of Chuck’s exactly, and how had he never noticed that from her before? That anxious doubt over her worth, her place with them, that same insecurity? She's always seemed so confident, before now. Proud, even.

“Thanks, Mike,” she says softly. “You know I won’t let you down.”

“You couldn’t,” he says firmly. “You’ll never. I know.” He gives her shoulders a firm squeeze, then straightens up before it can get weird.

“Hey, you wanna give driving Nine Lives another go? We can fix the seat spacing—”

“No!” she yelps, then swipes her bangs back from her face, frowning. “I mean... I want... huh. I wanna check everything over, first, give her a tune-up? It felt like she was just gonna fall apart on me when I was driving her earlier, I couldn’t stop thinking about how long it’d been since I checked the stabilizers. Can we check the stabilizers? What if they fail like, halfway through and I splatter myself over like ten miles. Or the—the tire pressure, one of them could blow—”

Her voice is pitching upwards, squeaking with distress, and Mike says hastily, “Yeah, it’s cool! I don’t have anything else to do today, let’s work on her. We can go over everything, do all the safety checks. Make sure there isn’t a bolt out of place before you hit the road again.”

Julie smiles at him gratefully, runs her hands through her hair again.

“Cool,” she says, relieved. “Okay, yeah, great.”

They check out Nine Lives inch by methodical inch, Julie’s secondhand anxiety fading quickly into a much more normal possessive enthusiasm. Nine Lives is a great car, sturdy and imaginative, packed with buffers and boosters and holotech, with more than half of a Kane Co personal transport pod folded into her compact angles to keep the ride smooth and light. Julie could probably crash the cruiser through a couple buildings without getting knocked around too much, Mike figures, though luckily she hasn’t had to yet.

It just feels _good_ to work on a car, open her up and make sure everything’s running right. To try a couple tweaks, scrub out a little gunk here and there, check some filters, polish a couple dials and rims. And a couple hours pass just like that, busy and comfortable.

Then Dutch and Texas come sneaking into the garage, holding really big bundles of angular stuff wrapped in dirty sheets.

“Hey, guys,” Mike says, and they both jump. Texas tries to hide his bundle behind his back, can’t quite manage it, and just turns all the way around instead to hide it with his whole body.

“H-hey, Mike! Chuck!” Dutch says brightly. “Great to see you guys! Uhh... I thought you were out with Julie today in the Canyonlands?”

“Yeah, they got messed up, so we came home early.” Mike frowns. “I called you guys a couple times, we could have used the assist getting back up to ground level.”

“We were busy!” Texas says. “With _important_ \--”

“Super boring errands for the Cablers,” Dutch says. “Way across town from, uh, you guys, and like, also the Robot Roundup. Like as a hypothetical example of places we were really far away from today! Ask anyone.”

“Oh, yeah?” Mike says, narrowing his eyes. “Maybe I should ask the Mama’s Boys. Cuz it kind of looks like I might need to be making them _another_ formal apology.”

Tennie comes into the garage with a black eye, a pronounced limp, and an X-16 Autocleaner cuddled against her chest. When she sees Mike she squeaks and scurries behind Dutch.

“ _You said they’d be out of the base today!_ ” she hisses.

Mike gives Dutch a very, _very_ disappointed look.

“Haha! Uh! Well it’s been great catching up but look at time, we’d better get Tennie back home, right now. Bye!” Dutch says, and hustles Tennie right back out of the garage, Texas tip-toeing hastily after them.

Mike gives a long, deep sigh, and lets his forehead thump onto Nine Lives’ roof.

“Eh, we’ll fill them in on me and Chuck later,” Julie says. “I don’t want Tennie to know about this. The Cablers gossip worse than the Amazons, especially about weird tech disasters, so it’s just as well they’re all busy.”

“Easy for you to say, you don’t have to get the _Noogie Of Repentance_ from Junior,” Mike grumbles. “That guy’s got the sharpest knuckles in Michigan.”

“Good thing you’ve got the hardest head,” Julie says.

“ _Hey!_ ”

They go over Nine Lives from hood to hubcaps until Julie is swaying on her feet, yawing, and Mike takes the screwdriver out of her hand before she can drop it again.

“Bedtime,” he says.

“Oh, right,” she says vaguely, and looks around. “Gimme a ride to... oh. Nn.” She brushes her bangs back from her face, and there’s something raw and scared in her eyes, the way she looks down at Mike.

“Right,” she says again.

They scrub off fast in the garage’s big sink, stripping grease and sweat off with spare rags and the harsh handmade lye soap Jacob gets by the brick, and Julie recovers enough to splash at Mike and giggle when he swats her with a wet rag. She strips her shirt off when Mike does, like neither she nor Chuck have ever done—like she thinks Chuck does with him, apparently—and Mike does his best not to stare at the thick white lines of surgical scars Chuck’s body has all over his chest, where he was cut open over and over. Julie doesn’t act like they’re a surprise, and he wonders what she knows about Chuck that he doesn’t.

Then she pokes him right in the ribs, a calculating expression on her face, and he yelps at the tickle and jumps about half a mile. It’s a lot easier not to stare like a jerk when you’re under a deadly tickle assault, and they chase each other up to the kitchen.

Julie pretty much falls asleep in her bowl of oatmeal, and Mike has to keep poking her, but finally it seems like she’s gotten enough calories and can be left alone to go to bed and like, not starve to death during the night.

“So, uh... this was fun,” Mike says, before she closes her bedroom door on him. She gives him a wry smile, leaning against the doorframe.

“Yeah,” she says. “Weird as heck, but. I wish I had more time to just hang out with you guys.”

“Well, you’ll have a little,” he says. “I mean, until we get all this fixed.”

“Hopefully just a little.”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah.”

“Well, uh... goodnight,” Mike says awkwardly. He’s never felt awkward with her _or_ Chuck before, or at least not really, but this situation is just... so weird. Julie smiles at him again, hesitates, then pokes him a final time in the ribs. He yelps, smacks her wrist, and closes the door on her firmly.

“Goodnight!” she says, muffled.

He’s smiling as he heads off to his own bedroom. Weird doesn’t have to mean _bad_ , he figures.

 

*

 

Mike’s a little startled to find Chuck— _Julie—_ in the bathroom when he wanders in to brush his teeth. Chuck’s not an early riser, he likes later shifts. Julie apparently likes to get up and at ‘em early, just like Mike, but there’s a familiar sleepiness slowing her down.

What’s significantly less familiar is she’s got her own fancy Deluxian girl hairbrush out and is experimentally brushing her blond hair this way and that. The air of the bathroom is warm and humid and smells like her soap, that fancy indescribable chemical sweetness.

“Hey, cowboy,” she says, voice low and sleepy-rough, and _that’s—_ an interesting combination. To hear. “Think Chuck’d kill me if I took his bangs up a couple inches?”

“Uh,” Mike rubs the back of his neck. “He wouldn’t be happy. It’s some kind of, like, ex-techie thing he’s got. They don’t cut their hair after they... quit.”

“Mm. Great. If this lasts long enough I can get my regular hairstyle back.”

Mike thinks about Chuck in a couple years, hair in smooth blond waves past his shoulders, brushing it back with his long fingers.

“I guess!” he says, waving the thought away. “But we’ll get you two out of this before then, I’m sure. Don’t worry.” He essays a pat to Julie’s shoulder. This close it’s obvious that she used her own cleansers and stuff but didn’t know what to do about Chuck’s morning scruff. She catches him looking and grimaces.

“Yeah, this isn’t part of my usual routine,” she says, and scratches her jaw. “...Kinda cool though.”

“Uh-huh,” Mike says. It’s kind of a recent development that it’s been part of _Chuck’s_ routine, Mike still doesn’t need to do all that much to stay presentable.

“Hey, you could show me!” she says. She flips the mirror open in a flurry of elbows—Mike has to duck—and grabs the old fashioned razor, then waves it around. Enthusiastically. Mike catches her wrist hastily and she pauses, then flushes, laughing at herself.

“Okay, whoops, didn’t mean to shave _you_ ,” she says. She glances over her shoulder and takes one slow, over-careful step backwards, to sit on the closed toilet lid. Once she’s sitting she’s actually a lot closer to her usual height, a little under Mike’s shoulder level, but her lit-up grin is all Chuck. Like this is _A Project._

“Sure, dude— _Julie_. Gimme a sec.” He fixes his morning breath fast, a little self-conscious with her watching him this closely, bouncing one knee in place and pulling on her fingers as she waits.

Then he picks the razor up, takes hold of her jaw, and realizes he has no real idea how to do this from the other side. He could either admit this—not so bad—or fake it—probably bad but also, more fun. Or just go off-script entirely, _very_ fun. He gets out Chuck’s shaving cream and sprays Julie right in the face, then cracks up at her indignant shriek.

She grabs the can away and sprays _him_ , then grabs his arm with her free hand when he tries to dodge away and slams him face-first up against the wall. It’s very surprising to both of them, and there’s a long, tense moment where he can feel her warm breath against the back of his neck, smell girly soap and shampoo and the hand clamped around his arm is like iron underneath the hot skin. Then Julie hooks the collar of his shirt away from his back and squirts a really unforgivable amount of shaving cream down the gap.

“ _Oh, it’s ON_ ,” Mike breathes, and spins them out into the hallway. They leave an incredible, foamy trail of destruction all around the base, Julie moving a lot faster and hitting a _lot_ harder than Chuck usually—almost always—does, but also slamming into every possible wall and tripping over stuff that isn’t even _there._ Eventually when they're rolling around on one of the landings, the can runs empty, and Julie gives a huge sigh and throws the thing over the edge of the hideout. She lets out a triumphant _HA!_ at the distance it gets _,_ listening with satisfaction to the way it clatters faintly away.

“God, okay, Chuck’s body has some _serious_ perks,” she says. “I want to be all enhanced and whatever too! This is _amazing_.”

Considering she’s sitting on Mike’s legs with both his wrists trapped _casually_ in one of her hands, Mike thinks he can understand the sentiment.

“Just don’t overdo it again,” he says. “I don’t think there’s a fridge big enough to keep up with you if we spend all our time horsing around like this.”

“Killjoy,” Julie says. “You’re just mad I whupped you.”

“I’m not mad!” Mike protests.

“You’re _jealous!”_ she laughs.

“I’m getting a cramp!”

“Okay, okay. You big baby.” Julie gets to her bare feet, slipping and scrambling a little in all the foam, and stretches out her arms and shoulders, arching her back. Chuck really is a big guy, when he’s—when his body is—held all the way up and out, not folded awkwardly in on itself.

“ _Man!”_ she goes. “I can’t believe he lives like this. It’s like everything’s turned up to eleven like all the time. _Everything!_ Emotions, sensation, physical—stuff—processing power— _everything_. No filter. Did you know?”

Mike wipes some foam off his face. “Not... really,” he says, feeling kind of like a bad friend. “He doesn’t like to talk about himself much, you know. You, uh... you don’t either.”

“Well, I guess it’s easier to talk about other people,” Julie says frankly. “Maybe less ethical, though, I dunno.” She bounces a little on the balls of her feet, then slips on shaving cream and sits down hard. “Dang, I would _really like to stop falling over_ already!”

“You’ll get it eventually,” Mike says encouragingly.

“Blargh, eventually.” Julie wipes foam off her neck. “...I need another shower. Do you guys ration water down here? I forget.”

“Uh, well, the hot water runs out after awhile, but like, a long while,” Mike says.

“Cool, cool, we can both take one. Uh... man.” Julie surveys their trail of destruction. “Haha, wow. Shoot.”

“Let’s deal with this... later,” Mike decides. He and Julie manage to get to their feet, and they head back to the bathroom much more furtively than they came out of it.

“Right, so, okay, shaving,” Mike says, Julie once more sitting down. “Well, we definitely aced the shaving cream step.”

Julie’s lips quirk up.

“Now... shaving.”

“Do you actually know how to do this, Mike,” Julie asks, which is such a _Chuck_ thing to say, too, Mike laughs.

“Yeah!” he says reflexively. “I mean—I’ve _done_ it.”

“Mhm. Well, just don’t cut off bits Chuck would miss,” Julie says. She closes her eyes and waits, and Mike takes hold of her jaw very carefully. He’s really aware right now of the skin under his fingers, and the steady pulse, and the soft rhythm of her breath. He starts moving the razor over the appropriate areas, peeling away broad stripes of white foam to show the smooth pink skin underneath. He rinses the razor off a few times. It seems like he’s doing okay. Julie’s gone really still.

“You okay...?” he asks, his voice coming out weirdly soft. Quiet. They’re very close together. _Peak weird_ , he thinks.

“Mmhm,” Julie sighs, just as soft. “...Feels kinda like when... Claire does my makeup. ‘S nice.”

Every line of her is loose and relaxed, her eyes hardly even twitching under closed lids. Mike thinks about Claire leaning over Julie like this, hand on her thin throat, thumb running over the soft curve of her jaw—touching her _mouth,_ putting that bright lipstick on—and he has to take a long, careful breath in and out.

“Right,” he says. “Okay. Cool.”

He finishes up and steps back to let her check out his work. She peers interestedly into the mirror.

“Yep, it’s Chuck,” she says. “Good job, dude.”

“Thanks!” Mike feels weirdly proud. “Guess between you and me we can keep—all this—in working order, right?”

“Yeah, piece of cake,” Julie agrees. Her grin’s crooked on one side, wry and perfect. She plants a hand on Mike’s chest and pushes him out into the hallway.

“I’m gonna wash off, _again_ ,” she says. “Gimme a sec to fix _all this_ up the rest of the way. Clean the other stuff or something, you can go next.”

“Right! I, yeah, right—” the door closes, and then the shower starts running, and Mike realizes with a sudden, stupid jolt that Julie is—Chuck is—they had to have come to some kind of agreement about this kind of thing, right? You don’t take a shower with your clothes on. And even if you kept your eyes closed the whole time, still—there’s stuff you have to touch...

Well, that part of this whole thing is _definitely_ not Mike’s business right now. Or ever! He turns resolutely away from the bathroom and goes to get a mop.


	2. Chapter 2

  
“Mikey!” Chuck yells, and breaks into a run down the access ramp from Deluxe. He thumps solidly against Mike’s chest and throws his arms around him, and Mike eagerly hugs him back.

“Dude! How’s it been!”

“Oh my god Mike it has been _so weird_ , man, I missed you, it’s been crazy!” In Julie’s body Chuck’s way too small to drag Mike where he wants him, but he gives it a solid go, and Mike, laughing, lets him. With a final squeeze, he pushes back from Mike and grins up at him, genuinely happy, and Mike grins back helplessly.

“You still haven’t figured out the hair, huh?” he asks, and ruffles it.

“Ha ha, screw you,” Chuck says, grabbing it all back from his face. Some’s gotten caught in the zipper of Mike’s jacket, somehow. “Claire said my next mission is learning to braid it myself.”

“You’ve been getting along with Claire?”

“Yeah, I—I don’t know, I think so. I’ve been, uh, trying to play it cool, you know? Julie’s—like, she’s good for playing it cool.” Chuck runs his hands through his long hair again. His smile is crooked, self-mocking. “It’s been kind of nice in here, really. Everything else is what’s nuts.”

“You gotta tell me about it,” Mike says, and throws his arm over Chuck’s shoulder, just like he would if they were still bros, like the normal way, but his arm goes down way further. It kind of tucks Julie’s body right up against his side, and her—and _Chuck’s_ arm goes around his lower back. It’s... nice. By the time they get back to Mutt they’re walking in sync again, like normal, kind of.

He keeps the car just under three hundred, and Chuck doesn’t even seem to notice, too busy telling him about all the crazy trouble he and Claire got into when she dragged him to the mall for some kind of Girl’s Day Out revenge.

“You got _hit on_?” Mike repeats. “Dude!”

“I know, dude!” Chuck pushes his bangs back. “I mean it was awful, I was so embarrassed, Claire just stood there the whole time with a bag of snack cubes and this guy’s trying to get my contact info so we could _‘talk about system optimization sometime’_ , which, sure, I freakin’ bet, that jerk wouldn’t know stack overflow from a sock drawer!”

Mike is laughing. Chuck punches his arm.

“Dude! It was _so bad_ ,” he says, but he’s laughing too. “Man, I want to like, program Julie a force-field. With a noise buffer. She can just switch it on when some guy tries to talk to her about programming. I think _Claire_ knew more about programming than some of the guys who were lecturing me! And there was this one guy—”

Except for the apparent _army_ of idiots who tried to tell Chuck what stuff he needed to buy to upgrade some of Julie’s Deluxe-side spy rigs, Chuck seems to have had a pretty good time.

“Was doing her job okay?” Mike finally asks. “Like... did you have to see...Kane?”

“Yeah,” Chuck says shortly. “Yeah, I had to see him. But it was okay. I handled it. I did okay.”

“Was it—”

“It was _okay_ , Mike.” Chuck does not look like it was okay at all. He’s staring out his window, fingers twisting over themselves, shoulders hunched up.

“Soooo,” Mike says, casting awkwardly around for another subject. “Makeup. What’s up with that?”

“ _Uuuggh,_ ” Chuck moans, and flops his head back against the seat. The following tirade about all the crazy stuff Claire _swore_ was _like, SO important_ to stick on his face lasts them all the way back to the base.

“Julie!” he yells, climbing out of Mutt. “Makeup is _SO DUMB._ ”

“Oh, shut up, it is not,” Julie says, coming across the garage floor to greet them. She grabs Chuck’s face and tilts it up, then angles it back and forth.

“You look great,” she pronounces.

“I have _moisturized_ ,” Chuck says. “You owe me.”

“I freaking shaved,” Julie says. “We’re square.”

Before all this, Mike wouldn’t have said Chuck and Julie were like, particularly close friends. All the Burners are totally there for each other, of course, but it seemed like Chuck liked hanging out with Mike first and Dutch second, when there wasn’t something important to do, and Julie was obviously best friends of all with Claire, and then after that maybe Mike, though he isn’t sure about that, she likes Dutch a lot too. Dutch is easy to get along with. Mike always hangs out with Texas a little extra, because Julie and Chuck are just nowhere near the guy’s wavelength, even though Texas has some other friends in other gangs he goes off to ‘bro it up’ with.

But apparently switching bodies with your team-mate in a completely insane science disaster brings you closer together as buddies, because Julie and Chuck are kind of all over each other, comparing all the weird stuff they’ve been up to and complaining about strange little inconveniences of each other’s lives.

“—look, I have just had to take _a lot_ of showers, okay? I mean! _A lot!_ ”

“Julie! Jeez!”

“We’ve been getting really dirty down in the garage,” Mike puts in, “you know, keeping busy!” because Chuck is looking scandalized and he should know how tough it is to scrub engine grease and stuff off. But they both just _look_ at Mike, and back at each other, and crack up.

“Boys are so gross,” Julie laughs. “Like! I like you guys! But you’re _so gross_.”

“Shut up!”

“You are!”

“Okay, okay, we are, but _jeez_ —could you at least _try_ not to overclock _everything_?”

Julie puts her head down on the counter and wheezes.

“Some parts can _wear out_ ,” Chuck says, mock-stern, and Julie tries to swat at him while convulsing. Mike’s sure he’s missing some kind of private Chuck-and-Julie thing here, but it’s nice to see them enjoying themselves so much.

They raid the kitchen for whatever’s around—looks like a lot of zucchini bread, which isn’t awful—then flop on the couches. Julie just straight up starts eating a whole loaf.

“You really do have to take it easier,” Chuck says, putting his boots in Julie’s lap. Julie starts examining them for wear, or something.

“Yeah, okay, how?” Julie asks. “I mean it’s not like I’m any good out _there_ like this,” and that’s—an uncomfortably familiar bitterness in Chuck’s hoarse, cracking voice. Chuck himself kind of winces.

“I’m sorry,” he says, and Julie sighs and pushes her hair back.

“It’s not your fault,” she says. “I’m the one who can’t handle it. You do fine.”

“I don’t and you know it.”

“Shut up. You’re always—you push through it, or something. You’re tough. I just keep...” she waves a hand in a circle, “...I can’t get it _together_. I keep thinking I’m in control now this time for sure and then something loud happens or I go too fast or I get tired and I’m in pieces again. It’s too much.”

“I think you’ve been great,” Mike says. “You’ve both been doing great. You’re smart and brave and you’re making a really weird situation work. And you can’t beat yourself up because you’re not like, perfect at something you’ve never done before. You’re doing your best and that’s all anyone can ask for, like, even of themselves.”

“Jeez, Mikey,” Chuck says, and punches his arm. “Real inspiring, dude.”

“I’m serious!”

“We know,” Julie says. She and Chuck glance at each other, smiling.

They end up watching a movie, some old historical thing with a lot of classic cars and car chases and fights on top of cars and stuff. It’s hard to imagine the Burners having to deal with the crammed and busy highways of old America, and traffic lights and police you had to listen to.  But old cars exploded _really cool_ , and that wouldn’t be so bad to see.

Julie falls asleep halfway through the movie, after eating most of the food.

“She’s gotta eat more,” Chuck says, quietly, looking at her. “It—everything gets a lot worse, when I’m starving.”

“She’s eating like the same amount as you do, usually,” Mike protests. He doesn’t like the sound of _starving_ , he’d have noticed _that_.

Chuck just snorts. “Yeah, and she’s been spending like all her time in the garage and stuff, right? Wrestling heavy stuff around? Doing a lot of extra chores?”

Mike shrugs. “Well—yeah, I guess. She wants to keep busy. It’s been fun.”

Chuck shakes his head. “She’s overdoing it. I—she—” he hesitates for a long minute, then leans over her— over his own body, “—okay this is really going to suck when _I’m_ back in there and you still know all this stuff, but, okay, look.” He brushes her hair back, gently. “Real dark circles under the eyes. Face is kind of thinner—see, here, around the jaw, it goes in. Her hands have probably been shaking more. Dry skin—around the nails, see, they’re starting to crack. Body temperature’s too high. She sits down a lot when she’s not throwing herself around too much, and she falls asleep—like now, just, suddenly. Out like a light. She’s burning more calories than she’s getting, probably more than anyone normal can actually eat, she _needs_ to chill out.”

“Buddy,” Mike says. “You’re... you’re like this a lot.”

“Yeah,” Chuck says shortly.  

Mike feels like probably the worst friend ever. “...Why?” he finally asks.

Chuck shrugs. “If like most of your brain was a garbage fire, Mikey, wouldn’t _you_ want to throw yourself into whatever there was left you could actually do?” he asks, and runs a hand through his bangs. “...And there isn’t much sit-down work she can even do down here, I gave her all the security codes but we’ve been trained on different programming languages—only a couple of our operating systems will even _interface_ —and outside of a direct attack on our hideout, which might knock some stuff offline or corrupt it or whatever, there’s no spywork she can do down here that I can’t do better up there. Deluxe systems are really well insulated from Motorcity’s, there’s a reason we need Julie to go back and forth for us. It’d kill me to try and punch through all the stuff she can just walk past. But now she’s stuck down here.”

“Oh,” Mike says.

“There’s always actually getting in a fight,” Chuck says. “Running Mutt’s systems is—is pretty great. But it sounds like she can’t handle it yet.”

Feeling like a real jerk, Mike shakes his head. “She’s used to her own car.”

“And her own brain, yeah. Man, I hope Kane doesn’t attack us while we’re like this. I can’t drive Nine Lives either.”

Mike sighs. “Yeah. Well, at least you can give us some warning, right? If he’s planning stuff?”

“...I don’t know. A heads-up, yeah, but… he doesn’t really... talk to Julie much. About his evil plans and junk. As much as I... was worried about. But I don’t know how she gets such good info, now. We’re gonna have to talk about that.”

Mike reaches out and squeezes one of Chuck’s thin shoulders. When Chuck curls in on himself like this he seems terrifyingly small and fragile instead of just unhappy.

“Chuck,” he says, “ _are_ you okay?”  

“I... don’t know. Everything’s kind of... remote,” Chuck says, looking at his hands. The nails have been painted a bright, glossy blue. “Like... I’m hearing and seeing everything, but it takes awhile to have feelings about it. I can decide not to have any feelings about it. Even when I was on that dumb booster and couldn’t feel fear, I could feel all the other stuff, it wasn’t _optional_. She’s... I don’t know if it’s healthy to be like this, to be...” He cups his small, pale hands around an invisible sphere, then brings them together as if compacting it. “...I don’t know how to stop, how to be all the way here like... for real. I don’t know if she _can_ stop. If she’s been like this for... however long. Crushed down. For so long it’s part of her actual physical brain.”

Mike wants to have some reassuring, leader type thing to say, something to fix this, to wipe that awful _distant_ expression away, but he doesn’t. He just feels sick.

“We’ll figure it out,” he finally says.

Chuck shakes his head and leans against Mike, shrugging Mike’s arm over his shoulders. Like this, he’s something narrow and small, a delicate bundle of thin limbs and sharp little elbows. It’s not like slinging an arm around Chuck normally, there’s nothing warm and solid about this body. Something fierce and protective rises into Mike’s throat, and he wants to pull her—him—onto his lap, wrap both arms around them, keep them safe, make everything okay.

“You wanna put on another movie?” he asks instead.

“God, yes.”

 

*

 

Mike goes to have a word with Jacob about Chuck’s—about Chuck-and-Julie’s problem with food, and is surprised when instead of looking concerned, Jacob just throws his hands up in the air in exasperation.

“You think I haven’t been going grey over this, kiddo?” he says, and ruffles his own hair in demonstration. “Chuck’s augmented, he should be packing in at least a thousand extra calories than he gets, ever, and none of you Deluxe-born kids will eat meat, so it’s a damn chore to get any protein in any of you, Mike! You’re a pack of growing boys, you need protein!”

Mike blinks. “Oh,” he says. “Uh. I thought your plants had some—? Like, soy?”

“God save us all from vegetarians,” Jacob mutters. “And teenagers.”

Mike shuffles uncomfortably. “...We could try,” he says. “I didn’t know it was such a big deal. It’s just—”

“—Yeah, yeah, dead animals, they’re gross if you don’t grow up with the idea, I know. Can we give eggs another shot? You can’t go another year on just pizza, Mike. Cheese and soy isn’t enough. And it’s not like we can order that Kane Co. Soldier Chow they had you cadets on.”

Eggs come out of the wrong end of a bird and are also dead, unless they turn into another bird somehow, but Mike forces himself to nod. “Yeah, okay, that’ll be okay,” he says. “I’ll talk to the others about it.”

“Thanks, kid. You’re alright.” Jacob pats him roughly on the back. “I’ll get a couple dozen tonight, I know a guy.”

 

*

 

The next morning, Mike comes out into the garage to find an absolutely vicious fight going on. Julie’s standing in front of Nine Lives, drawn up as tall and broad as Chuck’s body can possibly get--which is pretty dang tall and broad--arms crossed, chin tilted, looking kind of jittery and kind of murderous. Chuck’s pacing-- _prowling?_ \--back and forth in short arcs around her, long hair going everywhere, Nine Lives’ ignition key dangling from one small fist. They’re hissing at each other, back and forth, light on their feet like they’re just this side of a fistfight, and when they catch sight of Mike they round on him both at once.

Mike jumps back and puts his hands up defensively.

“Guys,” he starts, but--

“Tell him no!” Julie demands, voice cracking.

“Screw you!” Chuck snaps. “I’m going! Mikey, tell her some of us have _responsibilities!_ ”

“It’s just a bunch of pretend!” Julie snarls back. “This is _real_ , Chuck, this is _serious!_ ”

“It’s my kingdom, they’re my people!” Chuck shouts. “I’m not losing this whole freakin’ campaign to Blackmaw’s two-bit mercenaries because _you’re_ the team coward now!”

Julie goes pale with anger and gets, somehow, even taller. Mike recognizes her body language, the steel-spined posturing of a girl used to glaring people down from below their chin, and strides forward to grab her arm before she can open her mouth and say anything worse.

“No one’s the team coward,” Mike says firmly. “Calm down, you two, and tell me what’s going on.”

“Chuck wants to go LARPing!” Julie wails.

“ _Julie’s_ having a big freakout over nothing!” Chuck says. “I pretended to be her all week, Mikey, I was _good,_ I did my _job_ \--heck, I did HER job! And she’s pitching a big fit now that I gotta do some stuff for me! I’m not some dumb fake Julie hologram, I don’t have to take _orders_ \--”

“You don’t have to ruin everything to play fantasy games either!” Julie says.

“Stop _calling_ it that!” Chuck shrieks, throwing his hands up. “Stop acting like LARPing is _stupid_! I’m king, Julie, of real people who are really going to be really freakin’ upset if I don’t show, I can’t just--”

“You’re not king while you’re like _this_ ,” Julie shoots back, jabbing Chuck right in the chest. “What are you gonna do, roll up and say--” and here she puts on a weird, strangled voice, “‘hi guys it’s me Chuck, some weird science happened and now the Burners are down two guys and vulnerable--’”

“ _One_ guy,” Chuck says icily, swatting Julie’s hand away. “Or _girl,_ actually.”

Julie rears back, making an inarticulate sound of rage that sends an awful shiver down Mike’s spine--he’s heard it before but now it’s in a deeper, more masculine voice, the tone is bad, really bad, awful. Chuck’s slingshot is starting to assemble around her arm and Mike doesn’t think she even knows she’s doing it.

“Stop!” Mike shouts. “Just, _stop_ , guys, _hold it_.”

They stop, but just barely.

“Okay, we can fix this,” Mike says. “We can compromise, okay?”

“But--”

“No--”

“Enough! Chuck, can you come up with some kind of, like, believable fantasy reason why you’re not yourself?”

Chuck hesitates. “Yeah,” he finally says grudgingly. “I could say, like, a _witch_ stole my _life_.” He glares at Julie, but it feels at least a little bit like a victory.

“Great, cool,” Mike says tersely. “Julie, can you come along and pretend to be Chuck pretending to be--whatever story Chuck comes up with?”

Julie glares at her feet, her hands bunching and flexing. “I dunno,” she finally mutters. “I don’t... Mike, I _really_ don’t wanna go outside.”

“But _can_ you,” Mike presses her. “C’mon, Jules, you know this is important to him. And he’s been pretending to be you all week, it’s only fair.”

Julie sighs explosively and swipes one hand through her unruly bangs. “Yeah,” she says reluctantly. “I guess, yeah, I’ll... I’ll go, I can do it.” She shoots Chuck a tense, apologetic little smile. “I owe you.”

“Thanks, awesome, let’s go,” Mike says, keeping the momentum going, and steers them both towards Mutt. “I’m driving.”

“Of course you are,” Julie and Chuck say, at the same time, in the same resigned, amused kind of way, and Mike can’t help but break down laughing.

He probably shouldn’t _keep_ laughing at them when Chuck has to sit on Julie’s lap in Mutt’s passenger seat and they both cling to each other and scream. But he’s only human. And it’s _really_ cute, even if he’s probably gonna be deaf by the time he’s twenty.

They get down to the old southeast industrial district, where the mess of tunnels and drains around lake Michigan got overgrown with nontoxic glowshrooms ages ago, and Chuck scrambles out of Mutt so fast he trips over his hair with a yelp. Julie snags him just before he can faceplant, then nearly falls over herself once she unfastens the safety harness.

“ _Don’t_ ,” she says sternly to Mike, who has to cover his mouth with his hand.  

“Don’t what?” he says innocently, locking Mutt up and sliding over the hood to help the two of them get untangled.

“Don’t anything,” Chuck says, and gives him a little shoulder punch. Mike finds himself grinning anyway as he trails after the two of them to this week’s Battlefield.

“Hail and well met, travelers!” Darkslayer greets them, waving a Raymanthian flag from atop the bell of a truck-size mushroom. “Oh hey, Sorceress Wildclaw, I haven’t seen you for many a weekend! How’s it going!”

“Uh,” Julie says.

Chuck cuts in front of her. “Actually, my true companion, I bring news as fantastic as it is terrible!”

“Ooh,” says Thurman, who is also on the mushroom.

“Ooh indeed!” says Chuck, gesturing grandly. Julie rolls her eyes behind her bangs. “It is to my utmost regret that the Sorceress Wildclaw has turned against me--”

“Who?” Ruby asks.

“Me. Lord Vanquisher,” Chuck says.

“But you’re Julie,” Thurman says.

“Yeah, I know, but like I was _trying_ to say, the Sorceress Wildclaw is attempting to usurp the throne of Raymanthia through means most vile and treacherous, and--”

“That’s kind of harsh,” Thurman says.

“Yeah, you’re cool, Julie,” Ruby says. She raises a fist. “Lady solidarity!”

“Wildclaw switched bodies with Vanquisher,” Mike cuts in. He points at Julie and Chuck with both hands, then crosses his arms, pointing at them again with the other hands, to illustrate.

“Ohh,” says Ruby.

“ _Cool_ ,” says Thurman.

“Is Oracle in on this?” Ruby adds.

“It wouldn’t be all that treacherous if he was,” Chuck says. “Anyway, I’m the real king, me, Lord Vanquisher.”

“Actually, _I’m_ the real king,” Julie says. She grins down at Chuck and crosses her arms. “Me, Chuck. The real Chuck. Definitely Chuck, and not Wildclaw running around in your body and touching all your junk.”

“ _JULIE_ ,” Chuck squawks, waving his hands frantically. “Jeez!”

“What?” Julie says, grin broadening, “Got a problem, _Julie?”_ and looks over at Ruby and Thurman. “Anyway, my most loyal subjects, pray show me to my throne, so I may rule from it, as per usual for me, your king, Sir Vanquishey.”

“It’s Vanquisher,” Ruby says, starting to smile.

“Haha yes, of course, I did not forget that, because I am so definitely myself: Chuck,” says Julie, and brushes her bangs back enough to give Ruby a big cheesy wink.

Ruby actually giggles at that, and slides off the mushroom.

“Oh, of course, my lord,” she says, and sweeps a low bow. “Your throne most certainly awaits!”

“Ruby,” Chuck says, sounding betrayed.

Ruby has already hooked her arm through Julie’s, though she’s got to hike her elbow way up to reach.

“Lady solidarity!” she says. “ _Wildclaw._ ”

Julie sweeps off with Ruby and Thurman in tow, laughing wickedly.

“... So like, did Ruby know...?” Mike ventures.

“I never know what Ruby knows,” Chuck says grimly. “Man! I can’t believe she and Thurman threw in with Julie on this! They are _so demoted_ when I get my throne back!”

“Well then we’d better get going, my Lord Vanquisher,” Mike says, sweeping him the same kind of low bow Ruby had given Julie. Bowing to his king always feels very cool, very gallant: he really needs to get a cape like the regular LARPers have, so he can do all the flashy manners even better.

The look Chuck gives him is very warm, though, even if it’s on Julie’s face and Mike doesn’t have a cape.

“Well, at least I’ve still got you, Sir Smiling Dragon,” Chuck says. “A king couldn’t want for anything more.”

Mike’s chest goes all tight and sweet at that, and he gives another bow, just for the fun of it.

Around midnight, after a lot of running around and dueling and dramatic double-crossing, Julie carries a half-asleep Chuck back to Mutt.

“‘M’not that tired,” he mumbles, his face firmly pressed under Julie’s chin.

“You’re also not that heavy,” Julie says cheerfully.

“ _You’re_ not,” Chuck grumbles. “You’re like. A li’l kitt’n. Fluffy.”

“With like no alcohol tolerance either, which I would have told you, _my Lord_ , if you’d bothered to ask before the mead got broken out.”

“I’m _fine_ ,” Chuck says, and nuzzles Julie’s chin aggressively. “One pint! _One_ . ‘S’sad. You’re _sad_. I’m sad for you!”   

“Aww, boo hoo,” Julie says, jiggling him until he growls.

“ _Mike,_ ” he whines. Mike is busy taking pictures, but pretends not to be when Chuck peers over at him through the dark mess of Julie’s hair.

“Yeah, buddy, I’m here,” Mike says, and waves.

Chuck grabs his hand over Julie’s shoulder, then squirms a bit to get comfortable. He does not let go.

Mike sort of... he’s not sure what his face is doing right now, but his heart sort of feels like it’s stuck in overdrive. Julie is grinning at him. Chuck seems almost entirely asleep.

“I could drive home,” she says. “If you’re, y’know, occupied.” She jiggles Chuck again, who makes a sleepy mumble and squeezes Mike’s hand more tightly.

“No,” Mike says, more reluctantly than he really means to. “I got this, it’s cool.”

They separate carefully to get back into Mutt, Julie threading the safety harness around herself and Chuck with laser-focus and then starting to gnaw on the side of her thumb, apparently determined to keep quiet, her other hand cupped gently around the curve of Chuck’s skull--her own skull? Mike isn’t quite sure--to keep Chuck curled and peaceful against her chest.

Mike’s hand feels colder without anyone holding it, but he needs it to drive, and anyway it warms up fast enough once he gets going.

 

*

 

Claire comes down on Sunday, riding with Dutch on his way back to base from an overnight at the Cablers’. Julie meets her friend right in the garage, brightening as Dutch helps her step down from Whiptail’s sleek cockpit. Then Claire actually looks at her, eyes wide, and Julie folds into herself all at once, looking more like Chuck than ever, painfully shy.

“Oh, _girl,_ ” Claire says, in sympathetic horror, and goes and hugs her.  Julie shudders and then abruptly hugs Claire back, awkward but desperate, laughing a little.

“I knew it was gonna be weird, because I’ve been taking care of Chuck, but he—it’s still—you, sort of, I kept kinda forgetting that you’d be _him_ , down here, _are you okay_?”

“No,” Julie says. “Yes. Kinda. It’s fun sometimes. I can pick up a couch!”

“And the rest of the time you’re _Chuck_ ,” Claire says. “I mean _Julie really, oh my god._ ”

“Yeah. Yeah, I know.”

“I brought you those hairpins you wanted,” Claire says. “And like a whole other bag of stuff, like, I just totally wasn’t thinking, like, you’ve got this _whole different face_ and I was just like ‘lol, Julie will want her makeup!’ but— I mean you’re like—”

“I know! I know. Claire, I had to _shave_.”

“What, like—down—?”

“No! Claire oh my god, no, my face. Mike helped.”

Claire leans around Julie and gives Mike a look that suggests Mike has probably never actually helped anyone in his life before and she’s not prepared to believe that he might have this time. Mike gives her a sarcastic little salute, and she actually smiles.

“Well, I’m glad to hear your boys are actually good for something every now and then. Let’s see what we can do with you.”

Except for washing it with girl shampoo and regularly complaining about bangs, Julie hasn’t actually done anything different with her hair than Chuck has, and Mike is kind of interested in what’s going to happen. He trails after the girls to the breakroom couch, and leans over the back to watch Claire sit Julie down the floor in order to be able to lean over her.

“Okay, chin up,” she says, and Julie, smiling, eyes closed, lets Claire do pretty much whatever she wants, which is stare critically at her face for like thirty seconds at least, turning it back and forth.

“Well,” she says dubiously. “We could moisturize, I guess. That never hurt anyone. And you need to exfoliate like _crazy_ , I think you got like, _insane_ amounts of car gunk in there. Boys just don’t take care of their stuff.”

“Tell me about it,” Julie says wryly. Claire tips her jaw way back, and runs her thumb over the knot of Chuck’s throat, curiously, then rubs a patch where she must have missed shaving.

“... _Crazy_ ,” she repeats.

“Mmhm.” Julie’s already gone all soft and relaxed, like this is something they do a lot, and she trusts Claire completely, and it’s... a really good look, on her. Or either of them. Whichever. It looks nice.

“If you’re gonna lurk around you can hold my things,” Claire says to Mike, startling him a little, and pats the couch cushion by her side. Julie cracks an eye open and gives him a soft, friendly smile, so he comes around and sits, holding Claire’s bag really, really carefully. He can _too_ take care of stuff.

“What _is_ all this?” he asks, gently pushing the tubes and bottles and weird little tools around with just his fingertips. Claire slaps his wrist. “—Hey!”

“This is all Julie’s, is what! You wouldn’t get it even if I told you, anyway.”

Mike huffs. He can build _cars_. It’s not like he’s gonna get outsmarted by a bunch of lipsticks, or something. Dutch has sidled into the room and gives him a big grin, like he thinks Mike actually would lose a fight with makeup, and settles down onto one of the other couches to bring up a game system.

Claire gets out a bunch of tiny little metal pins and starts slotting them experimentally in Julie’s hair, frowning and humming thoughtfully. Julie waits patiently. Mike tries to see what Dutch is playing, from here, and can’t. He bounces his knee a few times, and stops when Claire gives him a really disapproving look because apparently makeup bags self-destruct or something when you jostle them. There’s not much to look at besides Julie, wearing Chuck’s face in ways Mike just can’t get used to.

“Okay, what do you think?” Claire finally asks him, and he startles again.

“What?”

“Of Julie’s _hair_.”

“Oh. Uh—it looks nice?” It does look nice, pinned back like that. Really weird, but kind of cool.

“Hm.” Claire scrunches her nose doubtfully. “I wonder if it’s long enough for a ponytail.”

“It’s not,” Julie says. “I think he’s got maybe half a year to go. It’s almost there.”

“That’d be pretty cute. Don’t tell him I said that or I will murder you. It’s only cute when it’s you.”

Julie grins. Mike... thinks he’s gonna have to disagree. It’d be cute on Chuck too, probably.

Claire’s looking at him thoughtfully. “Hey, hold still,” she says.

“What—?” he says.

She pulls out a hairbrush shaped like a tube and goes after his bangs. He falls back, startled, but Julie’s laughing at him—he holds still and lets Claire do what she wants, smiling a little over at Julie, who’s obviously enjoying the show.

“I do actually have my own comb,” Mike says.

“A comb. You have a comb. Wow, all fashion disasters are immediately canceled! Look out, world, Mike’s got a _comb,_ he is an _adult_. You’ve also got like eleventy billion split ends and whatever you’re washing this mess with is not doing you _any_ favors. This is _not_ a good texture. _Boys!_ ”

Mike opens his mouth, realizes that someone like Claire is not at all going to like hearing that Mike just uses the stuff that comes in a bottle that says ‘cleanser’ for like, everything, and closes his mouth. Julie laughs at him again.

“Julie, can I borrow him for a minute? And your shampoo and stuff? I wanna wash this, like, for real.”

“Yeah, I’m cool here,” Julie says, taking the bag from Mike. “I’m gonna get started on the face peel.”

“The _WHAT_ ,” Dutch says, because he’s been listening to them all this time like a _huge_ jerk.

Mike is dragged to his feet and marched to the bathroom. They encounter Chuck on the way, who’s wandered out of his own bedroom in a spare blue shirt that is way too big for Julie’s body and is slipping off one shoulder and _wow_. Okay.

“Mikey?” he asks, yawning. “Oh, hey, Claire.”

Claire points at him. “ _You’re next_.”

Chuck raises both hands in the air and looks kind of scared. “What did I do!”

“You didn’t braid your hair before you slept! Like I _told_ you! Go find Julie and get that mess fixed!”

Chuck runs his fingers through his hair, doubtfully, and gets caught on some tangles, the whole long red mass of it spilling over his shoulders and all around his face and the neckline of that shirt is... really not where it’s supposed to be, like at all, and Claire _sees him looking_ and yanks him into the bathroom.

Mike thinks he would trade this room for any of Kane’s interrogation chambers in a heartbeat. His face feels really hot.

“ _Boys_ ,” Claire says again, but softer than before. Then she bends him over the bathroom sink and turns the faucet on.  Mike yelps and flails a little, cold water pouring over his ear, but this is _Claire_ , and if he hurt her even on accident he would probably have to die before Julie caught up with him, or else. So he just grabs the edge of the sink and grits his teeth and lets her wash his hair, which takes approximately forever. He really regrets having thought of interrogation chambers, because now it is kind of hard to stop.

“You are a really tense kind of guy,” Claire notes.

“I’m relaxed!” Mike says. “Doing great! Are we done yet?”

“Nope. You need conditioner.”

It’s not actually like being tortured or anything, but he’s not feeling so good by the end. It’s hard to keep still with someone moving around behind him and he can’t do anything with his hands and the running water drowns out way too many sounds. And she keeps dragging him around and he can’t do anything about that. He can’t imagine how this kind of thing makes Julie so peaceful.

“There, you’re done. You big baby,” Claire says, and pulls him upright by the back of his neck. He gives a totally involuntary shudder, hands fisting, teeth gritting against anticipation of—this is _Claire_ , he’s okay. It’s done. He’s fine. She gives him a towel.

“...You okay?” she asks.

“Yeah! Of course!” he says. “Are we done _now_?”

She snorts at him. “Yeah okay, make your escape. I’ll catch up.”

That should not have sounded so ominous. Still, Mike gets out of there before she can change her mind.

Julie and Chuck and Dutch and— _Texas is here_ , even, what the heck—all look up when he jogs into the break room, and Chuck’s eyes go a little wide.

“Hey, man, over here,” he says, and waves a hairbrush like a signal beacon. Mike goes and sits down on the couch right beside him, and—he’s not the right size or anything, he’s still got that wrong-size shirt on, but it feels better when he puts his arm up around Mike’s shoulders. Julie leans her head back against his knee.

“Looks like you survived, Cowboy,” she says, smiling. “Round one, anyway.”

Mike smiles back, feeling ridiculous and relieved all at once. Julie reaches up and drags the towel from around his shoulders to over his head, then scrubs his whole head and face and neck and everything until he laughs and bats her off him.

“Round two, Mike!” Julie yells, and jumps on him again. They bowl over the back of the couch—Dutch whoops—and roll around on the floor, Julie trying to smother him with a damp towel and Mike trying to throw her back on the couch. By the time Claire comes back into the room, Julie’s sitting on Mike’s butt, Chuck has grabbed his hands, the towel is _tied_ around his face _like in a knot_ and Dutch and Texas are cheering them on indiscriminately.

“Great to see you all taking an interest in fashion,” Claire says. “Nice look, Mike.”

“Thanks,” Mike says, kind of muffled.

“Now everyone sit back down and stop goofing around!” she demands, and they mostly do. When Chuck tries to slink by unnoticed, Claire shoots her arm out and fixes his shirt to sit all the way up on his shoulders. He _blushes_. Mike doesn’t think he’s ever seen Julie be embarrassed about anything, like, in her own body.

“Mike, couch. Now.”

“You could pick on Dutch for awhile,” Mike says. “He hasn’t had anything done yet.”

“ _Mike_. Dutch’s hair is amazing and he takes perfect care of it.”

“Woo!” Dutch goes, like a _huge smug jerk_. He holds up his hand for a highfive, and, after a moment of surprise, Claire highfives him. Then Dutch shoots finger guns at everyone like the _king_ of all smug jerks ever, and Mike has to throw a pillow at him.

Claire shoves him onto the couch and picks up a hairbrush. It is a shape Mike is pretty sure hairbrushes shouldn’t be. But it actually feels a lot better than the previous brushing, with less pulling and scratching.

Julie squeezes his knee. “ _Relax_ , dude.”

He unscrews his face with an effort and takes a big, pointed breath in and out.

“I’m chill,” he says.

“Uh-huh.”

“Super calm.”

“Sure.”

“Laid back as—”

“Both of you shush,” Claire says.

Mike actually does find himself relaxing after awhile. Girls might be on to something, here: it feels kind of nice to have the bristles pull across his scalp over and over, and someone’s hand warming up against the side of his face. When he opens his eyes again he thinks maybe he’s actually dozed off—he’s leaned against the arm of the couch now and Julie’s got Chuck seated between her legs, brushing his—her own?—hair in long, confident strokes. Dutch is painting his own nails bright warning-sign yellow and Texas is curiously dismantling something pink with a lot of spines and loops.

“Okay, how’s he look?” Claire asks, and everyone looks at him.

“ _Nice_ ,” Julie says immediately. The other boys just kind of shrug doubtfully. Texas volunteers, “Fancy?” in a cautious tone. Mike reaches up to feel what the heck has happened with his hair and is surprised to find that it’s really, _really_ soft now. Is hair _supposed_ to be like this?

“Huh,” he says.

“You’re _welcome_ ,” Claire says.  

“Yeah, uh, thanks,” he says, confused, and runs his hands through his hair more. It’s _crazy_ soft. And smells kind of distractingly like Julie’s now. Claire snorts at him and then goes, _finally_ , to pick on Dutch, because apparently yellow is not an acceptable color for anyone’s nails, even though nail polish has been made in that color for some reason and Julie bought the bottle in the first place.

“Texas wants black nails!” Texas says, apparently getting into it now that Dutch is. “Like a ninja!”

“What about red?” Claire suggests. “Like your jumpsuit accents?”

“Red is for ladies.”

Claire stares at him for a minute, then looks over her shoulder at Julie. Both Julie and Chuck shrug at exactly the same time, and Claire has to bite her lip really hard to keep from laughing.

“Okay!” she says, kind of strangled. “Ninjas! Great!”

“ _Heck_ yeah,” Texas agrees.

“Really you guys should have press-ons like Julie,” Claire says. “Those last for like a week or two without chipping. Polish is just gonna scratch _right_ off the minute any of you go _near_ your gross car insides. I’ve seen those things.”

“Wait, your fingernails aren’t real?” Mike asks, alarmed.

“Haha, jeez, no,” Julie says, waving her hand, then pausing and picking up Chuck’s hand and waving it. “I mean like yeah I have actual fingernails but these aren’t them.”

“ _What_ ,” Chuck says.

“You didn’t notice?”

“How was I supposed to! I thought they were just— _like_ that!”

Julie laughs. “No, they’re like, they’re a super-hardened composite polymer, they glue on—I can do Nine Lives’ maintenance and stuff and they don’t scratch or break or anything. And on some missions I sharpen the edges. Like, just in case.”

“Oh,” Chuck says faintly. “...Wow. Do I, uh. Do I need to sharpen them, too?”

Julie snorts. “God, no.” She leans in and whispers something that sounds a lot like _“Some parts wear OUT, Chuck_ ,” and Chuck makes an incredibly interesting little squeak. Mike thinks he might suddenly get the missing part of the joke Chuck and Julie were laughing about a while back and, just, wow, okay.

Wow.

Claire is looking at _all of them_. Her eyes narrow and Mike heroically resists the urge to run all the way to Mutt and hide underneath.

“All I’m saying,” she says, “is you guys better know what you’re doing.”

“We do!” Julie says. 

“We absolutely do not,” Chuck says.

“Um,” Mike says.

“ _Boys!_ ” Claire goes _, again_. She very kindly doesn’t murder any of them, though she does paint Mike’s nails green after she finishes with Texas.


	3. Chapter 3

 

Kane finally attacks. They were all expecting it but it’s still a surprise when Chuck’s warning screens pop up all over the base. He opens a line right to Mike, a little out of breath, running somewhere in the dark.

“Some kind of self-animating viral programming,” he pants, “carried by the HOUNDS. They’re getting dropped right into the old industrial core to tear stuff up and corrupt as many old  machines as they can. Pick me up at the Southern access, I’m almost down there now.”

“Thanks, Chuck, that’s great. You okay?”

His face is as set and steady as Julie’s ever was. “Yep. Just come get me.”

“You got it.”

Julie’s already opening up Nine Lives when Mike jogs past her. He tries to catch her eye but she won’t look at him, her mouth a tense, angry frown.

“Julie—” he says.

“I can do this,” she snaps.

“No one’s gonna say anything if you sit this one out, Jules,” he presses, and she rounds on him, shoulders squared, chin up.   
“Just because Chuck’s a crazy wreck doesn’t mean I can’t do _my_ part!” she says fiercely. “She’s _my car_ , Mike, you’re not grounding me!” She takes a big, stomping step towards him and Mike’s heartrate spikes. Julie’s aggressive, challenging body language looks _really_ different coming from a guy who’s even taller than Mike.

He holds his own hands up, _easy, okay_ , and goes, “Alright, Julie, if you think you can do it—”

“Screw you,” she growls. “I _know_ I can. I’ve _got_ this. It’s _mine_.”

She shoves herself into the driver’s seat and roars out of the garage. Mike sighs, a bad feeling building in his chest, and follows in Mutt.

Chuck’s waiting right where he said he’d be, tossing Julie’s boomerang around and jumping to catch it again. When Mike pulls to a halt by him his face is weirdly blank. He throws himself into Mutt’s passenger side and clips in without much more than a nod to Mike, brings up his operating screens—and finally makes an expression, his face screwing up in wild anger at the yellow light.

“ _Damn!_ ” he hisses, and swipes his hands through the yellow windows to clear them. He reaches for some of the manual controls set into Mutt’s ceiling, gets caught short by the safety harness, curses again, and _snaps it off._ Mike stares at him, shocked, then has to pay attention to the road before he runs into a highway divider. Chuck barely blinks at the fast swerve, kneeling up on the seat to dig into Mutt’s systems through the emergency access panels.

“You okay, buddy?” Mike asks.

“Stop _asking_ me that!” Chuck snaps at him. “I’m a foot shorter than I should be and none of my operating systems are compatible with Mutt because we thought it was best practice to quarantine all the cars from each other and Julie’s not answering hails because she’s probably having a grand mal freakout at four hundred miles an hour and I can _HANDLE THIS.”_

 _“_ Okay,” Mike says tightly. “Let me know if there’s anything I can—”

“ _Just drive_ ,” he snaps. Mike swallows hard, and drives.

It’s a bad fight. The Hounds can somehow compel industrial machinery to reconfigure itself into more Hounds, pipes and gears and and pistons twisting together into long metal limbs and snapping jaws that burst through the rotten windows and doors of old factories. Julie keeps her com line one-way the whole time, so no one can hear her, but they don’t know how she’s doing or what she’s thinking when she goes tearing off to chase Hounds on her own. Chuck snaps out orders and warnings while viciously stabbing and rewiring Mutt’s internal systems on the fly, and at one point he shorts them all out and shrieks in frustration loud and sudden enough to make Mike flinch.

“Put your seatbelt back on,” Mike yells at him, kind of amazed that’s something he even has to _say_.

“I can’t reach if I do!” Chuck yells back, and gets slammed hard against the side window _again_ when Mike has to bank suddenly to dodge another snapping metal beast. There’s a darkening bruise on his cheek already, but he keeps sitting in his seat wrong, up on his knees, and just _takes it_ when he gets thrown around. His expression hardly flickers from a totally focused, grim scowl.

Julie comes online suddenly. “—got it,” she says, voice cracking thinly. “I got it, guys. I can shut them down. Cover me.”

“Cover you? Where—” he sees where. Julie, on foot, running flat-out down the block past them and straight towards one of the biggest Hounds, the first ones to drop. Chuck’s a big guy but against these iron monsters his body looks like a mouse.

“What’s she _doing_ ,” Chuck mutters. “No, no, this is— this is so dumb, Julie, come on! If she gets me squashed—”

Julie does not get squashed, though it’s a near thing. She dodges the pounding blows of the Hound’s claws and then _jumps_ , screaming, right on top of its face. Blazing with green and blue lights, she punches it right through the eye, then hangs on while it throws its head back in an agonized mechanical wail.

It drops to the ground, twitching, and shortly after that the nearest Hound also drops, then a little further away another one does: one of the new factory-machine composites, and it falls back into pieces as it hits the ground.

Mike slams the brakes with Mutt’s nose almost right up against the still body of the first dead Hound, and is scrambling out the door in the next breath. He can’t see Julie anywhere, and he pulls kind of helplessly at one of the big cables in the heap.

“Around here,” Chuck says flatly. “I think she got thrown. She broke my arm.”

Mike dashes over to the other side, vaulting enormous chunks of rubble and slabs of metal, and finds Chuck just kind of standing there over Julie, face blank. Eyes cold and distant, like he’s just... gone, somewhere.

Mike swallows hard, then goes to his knees by Julie and brushes blond hair back from her face. She’s shocky-pale, expression tight with pain, one of her arms cradling the other close. Blood’s starting to pool on the pavement under her shoulder.

“Dad...?” she says vaguely, turning her face into his hand. “I... no, no. Mike. It _hurts._ ”

“You messed your arm up pretty good, Jules,” Mike says.

“Mike, it _hurts_ ,” Julie says, her voice starting to crack. She’s shaking now, breathing too fast and shallow. Mike gets her sitting upright and hisses through his teeth at the sight of her arm, the flesh ripped open in long, nasty cuts, bone showing in her torn knuckles. She’s bleeding way too freely and there’s definitely a break somewhere in her forearm, the skin gone lumpy and wrong.

“Man, this is hamburger,” Chuck says coldly, leaning over her. “If I lose a finger because of _your_ crazy I’m cutting some of yours off, you hear me?”

“Don’t,” Julie whimpers, when Chuck grabs her wrist and elbow, and Mike goes, _“Hey! Chuck—”_ but Chuck just pulls her arm straight, a sharp efficient motion that makes Julie _scream_. Mike finds himself on his feet, shoving Chuck backwards with both hands.

“What the heck, _dude_ , don’t hurt her!” he says.

“It’s _my body_ she just pulped!” Chuck snaps back. “She can’t just _do_ this crap!” He bounces a bloody fist off Mike’s chest and Mike takes a step back, startled at his anger, and how ugly it makes his face.

“Chuck,” he says weakly. “Dude, come on...”

“You come on!” Chuck shouts. “Just because she can’t handle my issues doesn’t mean she gets to— to _gamble_ with _my life_ like that! That’s _my body_ , Mike!”

“But I won,” Julie says, and the two of them stop and look down at her. She’s on her knees, clutching her arm and rocking back and forth, her face wet with tears and a smear of blood. But she grins at Chuck, all mean and manic and scary. “I _won_ , Chuck. When’d you ever do anything like that, huh? You’re running me and you’re still _scared._ ”

For a second Chuck looks as furious as Mike’s ever seen him _or_ Julie, and he grabs him by his slim little shoulders, not knowing what he’s gonna do next. But instead of going after Julie again, Chuck just takes a deep breath, in through his nose, out through his mouth, and turns sharply away.

“Right,” he says flatly. “Okay. That— yeah, okay. That’s okay, then. We won so it’s okay.”

“ _I_ won,” Julie says, and laughs, a hysterical-sounding giggle that trails off into low, pained moaning. God, she’s bleeding a lot.

Texas and Dutch finally come up, looking worried.

“Everyone okay?” Dutch asks.

“Not even a little,” Mike says frankly. “Texas, can you drive Chuck back to base? I’ll take Julie in Mutt.”  

Texas looks at Chuck warily, who looks back at him with that eerie, cold flatness that Mike’s really starting to hate.

“Sure, why not,” Chuck says. “Everything else is going _so well_.”

“Uh,” Texas says, and rubs the back of his neck. “...Yeah.”

They split up, Mike half-dragging Julie back to Mutt, desperate to get some gauze on her arm. He patches her as best as she can and then floors it back to base at 300mph, achingly aware of every bump in the road, every rough jump or necessary roundabout. Not because it makes Julie scream, but because she’s gone almost completely quiet, just moaning a little every now and then, at random.

Jacob’s waiting for them, though, and hisses sympathetically when he sees Julie’s arm.

“She’s gonna be okay, right?” Mike demands.

“Yeah, yeah, I’ve seen worse,” Jacob says, patting him on the shoulder, then coming around Julie’s other side to help carry her. Chuck’s body is a heavy, ungainly weight to deal with when whoever’s operating it doesn’t feel like making an effort.  

When they get Chuck to the crash room and laid out on a table, her good arm flails in the air, and Mike catches it; immediately Julie grabs his wrist hard enough he can feel bruising, and hangs on. He holds her back just as tightly, something in his chest easing when her shocky, distant expression starts focusing on his face.

“I’m sorry,” she says, in a terrible small voice.

“We got you, you’re gonna be fine,” Mike says.

“No, I’m. This is. This isn’t me, I’m sorry, I messed it up, I messed everything up, tell Chuck I’m sorry!”

“Hey, hey, it’s okay, Jules, it’s okay. You’re gonna be just fine, you can tell him yourself.”

“I’m sorry, I’m so sorry—”

“Shh, shh, it’s okay,” Mike insists. He scoots closer, holding her hand tightly to his chest, and drops a clumsy, awkward kiss to her forehead. She whimpers and presses her face into his shoulder, like she’s hiding. It makes something in Mike’s chest go warm and scared and tender, just like when Chuck’s rattled enough to do this with him. He holds really still, so she can stay there.

Jacob cleans out and glues shut the awful gouges, administers a couple different shots, gently tests every finger and the bones of the palm and wrist to make sure nothing else is broken, and sets the arm.

“You’ll heal up fast if you take it easy,” he says, printing a honeycomb cast onto the limb. “Crazy kids. You’re gonna give me a heart attack one of these days. I don’t even want to know how you got this.”

“It was—” Mike starts, and Jacob flaps a hand at him.

“ _Don’t_ want to know. But I’d certainly like you all to promise not to do it again.”

“I’d like to promise that too,” Mike says. “But you know... with Kane and all...”

Julie lets out an awful little laugh. “My dad would _kill me_ if he saw me like this,” she chokes out, and then just keeps laughing, until she’s choking for air again, leaning hard against Mike, shoulders hitching with the strain of every fast, desperate, shallow breath.

Mike looks at Jacob, helpless in the face of everything that’s wrong, and Jacob just shakes his head, equally miserable.

“We won,” Mike says. “We won again, and we’ll keep winning. And—and no matter what, we’re gonna be here for each other, and fix each other up however we can, and get better, and even if things seem bad now, it’s all going to be okay, someday. We’re just gonna keep going until then.” He’s not really sure who he’s trying to convince.

But Julie manages an almost-normal gasp, then another, and slowly starts to catch her breath. He rubs a circle on her back, like he saw Chuck do, then does another one and keeps going. It’s really comforting to be able to do this: he kind of hopes when Chuck is back in his body, he might let Mike do this for _his_ freak-out sessions.

“...told you I could do it,” Julie finally mumbles. “I could do it, I could _win_. Even like this. You can’t ground me, Mike, you can’t—you can’t _stop_ me, no one can _stop_ me. I can do anything I need to.”

 _No filter,_ Mike thinks. He doesn’t want to know who’s been telling Julie otherwise, up in Deluxe, what’s made her so desperate to throw herself against any limitation until something breaks. He feels sick enough already.

He just rubs her back again. “Let’s go get you lying down, huh?”

“I’m not tired,” Julie says, but when she gets to her feet, she sways, and Mike has to get her good arm over his shoulders.

“I’m tired,” he says. “You can sit with me.”

 

*

 

After bad fights, Mike doesn’t like to just go back to his room, and it kind of seems like no one else does either. The other guys are crashed out already in the breakroom when Mike and Julie get there, some kind of mindless cartoon playing with the volume low, Dutch and Chuck on one couch, Texas on another. He’s holding a grease rag up to his nose—Mike didn’t know he’d been hurt in the fight.

He settles down on the third couch with Julie and notices that Chuck’s actually being _held down_ by Dutch, one of his hands wrapped tightly around Chuck’s upper arm. Chuck’s staring at the far wall, his face flat but his eyes hot with anger.

“Uh,” Mike says. “...What?”

“Brenda _punched_ me!” Texas complains.

“I’ll hit you again, too, I told you to get my _name_ right—” Chuck snarls, trying to get up, and Dutch sighs and holds him down harder. Chuck gives up after half a minute, obviously exhausted, but just as obviously furious.

“I just _said_ , it was cool _Suzie_ was a _lady_ now, cuz his—”

“I am going to _GET YOU_ ,” Chuck shouts.

“—matches the outside.” Texas sniffs into the rag. “And he hit me!”

“I’m so sick of you and your shit!” Chuck screams at Texas. “You give _Julie_ crap, you give _me_ crap, then you go hide behind Mike like a little kid! Screw you!”

“I’m not a kid!” Texas protests. “I’m a _man_. _UNLIKE YOU_.”

Chuck shrieks again, then rounds on Dutch and digs his nails in. Dutch yelps and flinches back, and Chuck _lunges_ for Texas. Mike tries to get to his feet only to find Julie’s still got hold of his arm, and isn’t letting go.

“Julie—!” He protests. There’s a vicious, lit-up, delighted grin on her face as she watches Chuck tear into his team-mate.

“Chuck beat me to this fair and square,” Julie says, cryptically. “ _Down_ , Cowboy.” And she forces him back against the cushions.

“I’m fucking _sick_ of _men_ like you!” Chuck is screaming, clawing Texas everywhere he can reach. “Up in Deluxe every fucking _day_ it’s _girls can’t do anything_ and _girls are so stupid and pointless and crazy_ and I have to come down here and hear it from _you_ and even when I _was_ a guy you never _let up_ and you think I’m _funny!_ I’m giving it everything I’ve got out there and you think I’m _funny_.”

“Whoah! I— hey— stop—” Texas manages to grab Chuck’s wrists, his hands and face welling blood in long lines. Chuck looks him dead in the eye, sneers, and rams forward with his forehead. Texas’s nose crunches and he _howls_ , dropping Chuck and trying to get away. Dutch is on his feet, staring with frozen horror at everyone.

Julie lets Mike go. “There,” she says, and there’s an awful satisfaction in her voice. “You can stop ‘em now.”

Mike runs after them and grabs Chuck before he can catch Texas again, arms around his narrow chest and picking him straight up off the ground. Chuck screams in rage and kicks out but can’t get any purchase, and Mike knows to dodge those nails by now, holy crap. He carries Chuck back to the couches and shoves him onto Julie. Chuck tries to jump back up but when he sees who he’s sprawled over, he blinks, huffs, and subsides.

“We’re even, now,” Julie tells him, and a smile quirks one side of Chuck’s mouth. His lipstick’s all smudged and she reaches down with her good hand, fixes it with the side of her thumb. Chuck’s smile goes a little wider. He takes up Julie’s broken arm and inspects it, not looking anywhere near as mad as before, while Julie licks her thumb again and starts rubbing the new welt on his forehead.

“That was—that was completely uncalled for!” Mike says, finding his words. “You can’t just hurt your friends like that, Chuck! What were you _thinking!?_ ”

“I was thinking we’d had just about enough of his shit, especially after this kind of night,” Chuck says. Julie pats his hip in some kind of agreement. “And I’m thinking I’ve had just about enough of _your_ thinking we should all put up with it forever because I guess _us Burners_ never stand up for ourselves when it’s _friends_ who are picking on us! Especially us STUPID SECOND-CLASS _GIRL_ BURNERS _._ ”

Mike feels like he got punched.

“What?” he says. “But—you guys, he’s just playing around. That’s just how Texas is, it’s just joking.”

“Jokes are a lot funnier when you’re not the punchline, Mike,” Julie says.

“Oh,” Mike says, and sits down. He rubs his face with the heel of one hand, runs his fingers through his hair— sweat-damp but still extra-soft underneath.

Chuck’s gone limp, draped across Julie’s lap, and they both look so tired: exhausted from a lot more than just this one fight. Mike has been failing them in ways he never even knew about.

“I’m sorry,” Dutch says, and they all look at him. He’s sat back on his couch, looking unhappy. “I know Texas is a pain in the butt sometimes, but I just thought, I dunno...”

“I know what you thought,” Chuck says coldly. Dutch winces.

“I should have had your back,” he says. “You too, Jules. I’m dating Tennie, and all. I know girls can do— whatever. They’re just as good.”

“It just really sucks to be called a girl all the time as an _insult_ ,” Chuck sighs. “And it’s not fair to Julie to have to hear it, too. That’s all I want him to know.” It seems like even with Julie’s vicious, driving temper behind a really good reason to be mad, he’s as eager to move past anger as ever. That’s something, at least.

“I’ll talk to him,” Mike offers. “It’s probably actually gonna help that you sent him running, even if that wasn’t—uh—very nice? You know it can take him awhile to understand new stuff.”

“Ha. _New_.” Julie says darkly. Chuck nods against her chest, eyes closed. They’re both obviously falling asleep, so Mike just sighs, and tries to let it go for now. He turns the room lights down and stretches out on his couch, kind of wishing he was still holding on to Julie. She catches him looking, as she’s rearranging herself and Chuck, and gives him a wry, forgiving kind of smile. Stretches her hand out. Her arm’s just long enough for their fingers to catch when he stretches his out, relief rising hot and sharp in his chest. Dutch is still sitting up, keeping some kind of watch, and things really aren’t okay, but they’re getting there.

 

*

 

The next day things feel a whole lot less okay. Julie hides in her room until Mike actually physically drags her out for a late lunch. The dark circles under her eyes and shaking hands are worse than ever, and she flinches and startles at every noise or movement anyone makes. She’s worn out, running on empty, paying the violent debt of the last day’s action, and transparently desperate for no one to call her on it. Chuck hangs around Mike in a wide orbit, quiet and withdrawn, slow to respond to anything that happens.

“I should get back,” he says finally, drifting over to Mike in the garage. Mike’s attending to the scratches on Mutt’s hood, and Chuck barely looks at them. He stares at the wall.

Mike frowns. “Are you...” _alright?_ No. _Sure?_ Apparently. “Whatever you say,” he amends.

“Cool. Thanks.” Chuck gets in the car. At least he puts his seatbelt on. The heavy bruising on his arm and face from last night are totally gone somehow, makeup or hologram or magic or something.

When they get to the access ramp, Mike says “Hey, wait,” just before Chuck gets out of the car. He looks back and Mike fumbles with his own seatbelt, then leans over and hugs Chuck, hard. He smells a lot like Julie, but still, weirdly, a little like himself.

“If you need to talk—” Mike says, “—or, or anything, you can just— you know I’d—”

“Mike...” Chuck says, and one hand presses against Mike’s side. “Dude, I can’t right now. Okay? I can’t. Sorry.” He pushes Mike back into the driver’s seat, gently but firmly. Mike could push back, but he doesn’t. His face feels hot but in a totally miserable way, not even an embarrassed way. Chuck’s face—Julie’s face—is more blank than ever, totally remote.

“Take care of yourself,” Mike says desperately.

“I’m trying,” Chuck says. He opens the car door and walks off, steadily. He doesn’t look back.

When Mike drives back to the hideout he finds Julie standing in the middle of the base, slingshot out, playing target practice with the far walls. Mike can see the hard tremble of her arms and spine before he gets within ten feet of her.

Mike thinks, kind of meanly, _could you two stop being so messed up for just a second so_ I _can be messed up?_ And then feels pretty bad about thinking it.

“Hey, what’s this about?” he asks. “Did Texas—”

Julie shakes her head stubbornly and shoots at a chunk of concrete until it explodes.

“Julie. Come on—”

She wheels around and suddenly the targeting screen’s narrowing in on his face. He glares at her through the green diamond and crosses his arms. After a moment he also taps one foot. She sighs—a big, dramatic noise—and retracts the whole weapon system.

“I was so scared,” she says. Fast, kind of challenging. “Last night. I’ve never been that scared in my life, it was like—I could jump off the Tower again and it would be nothing. Just nothing. It was like being on fire. I kept thinking, if I just—if I could just—if I could just push through it and get to the center—if I could get through the worst part I could burn out, burn _it_ out. If I could do the scariest thing possible, run right at that HOUND and _win_. I’d... there wouldn’t be anything left to be scared of, and I did it, I won, I punched a freakin'  _HOUND_ to _death_. Then this morning I dropped a spoon and had a panic attack over the noise it made.”

“...Oh.”

Julie turns around and Chuck’s slingshot unfolds again from her broken arm. The rush of hot wind the weapons system raises doesn’t disguise at all the harsh tremble in every limb, or the cracked and awful noise of pain that rises in her throat.

Mike takes her wrist, very gently, and pulls it down. He doesn’t really know what to say that won’t make anything worse, but she doesn’t fight him when he pulls her into a hug. She rests her face on his shoulder, though, which makes him feel a little better, despite himself.

“Chuck’s kind of... not doing so hot, either,” he finally says. “Maybe if you took it easy, he might, too.”

“Maybe,” Julie says, though she doesn’t sound all that positive. But when he starts to pull her back into the base, she lets him. He dumps her in the armchair on the landing and goes to get some egg salad, but by the time he gets back she’s passed out, her face drawn and sharp with exhaustion. He runs his hand over her hair and he wants... he wants a lot of things, really badly, and when she turns her head into his palm... he puts the bowl down in her lap and goes back to his own room. He might as well take his own advice, and get some sleep before the next thing blows up.

 

*

 

Mike has awful nightmares all night, full of violence and falling and grief, and he drags himself off to the kitchen the next morning feeling more than a little defeated. He’s sitting on the landing with his feet hanging over the edge, working his way through the least nasty flavor of Jacob’s probably-really-healthy tea, when Julie finds him.

“Hey, Cowboy!” she says brightly, and he looks back at her, startled and wary. She just grins and sits down by him, cross-legged and safely far back from the edge, and brings up a bright pale screen between her hands.

“Chuck’s found something,” she says. Just like that, Mike’s awake and enthusiastic.

“Really? What? Is it about your—the thing?”

“Is that Mike?” Chuck says, leaning into the frame. His hair’s braided back and he doesn’t have any of Julie’s makeup on. It’s kind of a neat look. “Okay, cool, you found him. So anyway—”

“Hi Chuck,” Mike says. “Good morning!”

“— _hi_ Mike, you big dork,” Chuck says, giving him a brief, fake-looking smile. “ _A_ _nyway_ , I used some of the decryption workhorses Julie’s built up here to go digging for info on the area we were transferred in.”

“Transferred? Oh, like, the explosion?”

“Yeah. Swapped, transferred, royally messed up, whatever, the explosion. None of the records I could find said it had been anything but a residential area for like half a century back from the founding of Detroit Deluxe, but _Julie_ kept saying—”

“— you can’t trust records any further than you can hack ‘em,” she breaks in. “There have just been way too many different agendas in this area over time, Kane’s only the latest guy to come through and try and rewrite Detroit into what he thinks it should be. Histories only ever say what the last person to open them wanted them to. So you have to look at as big a picture as you can, you have to get enough subjective accounts that they overlap into actual objective facts.”

“And when we started feeding enough garbage into a neural-networked analyzer—”

“—that Chuck rigged up—”

“—like, census records, weather patterns, traffic reports for a century, construction permits for like this entire half of the country for _two_ centuries—”

“—before it got paved over and turned into apartments, that whole neighborhood was some kind of primitive biocomputational research facility!” Julie waves her arms in excitement, jostling Chuck’s screen. “Like with brains and stuff!”

“What’s most relevant to us is how they probably got _shut down_ ,” Chuck says. “Like by their government. Whatever was happening there was _crazy_ unethical.”

“They just got buried,” Julie agrees.

“...Wow,” Mike says. “...Huh. So then we went digging around in some spooky old mad scientist’s brains-and-stuff experimentation lair and...” He waves a hand. Julie grins, holds her arms out like the Duke hamming it up, and makes a goofy little _ta-da!_ bow from the waist.

“And here we are,” she agrees. The manic delight of figuring stuff out fades from her face a little, and she leans back on her hands. “...Now we just gotta figure out where to _go_ from ‘here’.”

“Well, back there, right?” Mike says.

“No!” Julie and Chuck chime. They trade glances: Julie grimaces and leans forward.

“Mike, the area’s unstable and the equipment is, apparently, still somehow live enough to blow up on us. We’re not going back into that minefield blind and getting our brains like, any more messed up. What if you got hit with something?”

“Well... but we’d be where we could fix it, though.”

“We don’t know that yet,” Chuck says. “Mike, this is a great breakthrough and all but we’ve gotta take a little more time before jumping in our cars and racing off to get _more_ blown up. I want to see if I can find anything more about what that equipment even _was_ before any of us get anywhere near it.”

“Actually,” Julie says, “while I don’t think any of us should actually go _in_ there again, I bet if we got Dutch near the general area with Whiptail, we could use his sonics to map out—”

“No!” Chuck leans in intently. “We don’t know _what_ set _anything_ off, for all we know—”

“—everything could already be as blown up as it’s gonna get! Come on!”

“—it’s too risky. _No._ ”

Julie scowls. “Well, what are you gonna do about it? Come down and sit on me?”

“Like I’d have to.” Chuck crosses his arms, chin up, gone cold again. “I can shut you down from the inside-out, now. Don’t think you can push me around like I’m Mike.”

“ _Um_ ,” Mike says, before this argument can get any nastier or more personally embarrassing. They both glance at him, like they sort of forgot he was there. “So, I agree with Chuck—”

“Oh, cuz _now’s_ a great time for _that_ ,” Julie growls.

“—we should be careful here, Jules. Like punching killer robots and stuff is one thing, but you’re talking about risking your _minds_ again. It’d be cool if we knew what the risks were before we took them.”

“Mike!” Julie protests. “We have to do _something_ , we can’t just _sit around_ and hope some more answers fall out of the sky! We have to—”

“ _Julie,_ ” he says, taking hold of her shoulder. “Hey, ease up, it’s okay.”

“It’s not okay! We’ve gotta _move_ , we’ve gotta _fix this_ —” she looks around wildly, breathing hard, eyes wide and frustrated and frantic. “We, we can’t—we can’t just—I, I, I can’t, it’s just—”

“Hey. Breathe.” Mike pulls her against his side, slow and cautious, and rubs her back. She makes a shuddering, miserable noise into his shoulder, and clutches at his shirt. “Yeah, that’s good, just breathe, like Chuck told you. Okay?”

“Nnh.” But she takes a deep, shaking breath, and then another, warm above the collar of his shirt. Mike looks back up at the screen, wanting to say something to Chuck, something like _we could have done this too, I wouldn’t have minded, when you get back we could—_ but Chuck’s turned away, isn’t even looking, is typing something out on some other screens.  

“Cool, that’s settled,” he says, almost absently. “Hold down the fort and I’ll keep busy up here.”

“Chuck...” Mike says. Chuck glances at him, briefly, then away.

“I’m fine,” he says. “I’m taking care of myself.”

Julie presses her face against Mike’s neck as she shifts. “It isn’t _taking care_ for Chuck to lock down like a research project in my bedroom is some life-or-death covert ops down in Military Security,” she murmurs. “It’s just crazy.” But Chuck acts like he didn’t hear.

“Is there any of that you could do down here?” Mike asks him.

“Nothing we can’t give to Julie to keep her busy,” Chuck says dismissively.

Julie lets out a long sigh, mouth still right against his throat and Mike shivers, despite himself, and swallows hard. Julie sits up fast and Mike stares fixedly away, deeply embarrassed, because he didn’t mean— he wasn’t hugging her like _that_ , he didn’t mean to be.

“Can—uh, can you get me a drink?” Julie asks. Her voice is pretty high-pitched.  “Like tea or something from the kitchen. I wanna talk to Chuck for a minute.”

“Okay! Cool! Sure!” Mike says, scrambling to his feet. It’s hard not to just run flat-out for the kitchen but he cools it into a jog, then stuffs his face entirely into the fridge. He’s being ridiculous, lately, he _knows_ that, it’s just... everything’s been so crazy. It’s not like he wants to make anything even more crazy! But it’s hard not to be affected, is all. That’s definitely all.

He gets some kind of high-calorie potato breakfast mess out of the fridge while the tea’s heating up, then walks a lot more slowly back to the landing. Julie and Chuck are leaned towards each other from opposite sides of the screen, having a really ferocious-looking argument.

“—going on like this any more than I can! You’ve gotta open up with _someone!_ ”

“Yeah, okay, who! You?” Chuck’s face is mobile again with anger. “You’re a wreck too! Claire? She’s only putting up with me because she’s nice enough to not actually want me to die for real. _Mike?_ Like! Yeah, that’s great, after you two are done _snuggling_ I’m just gonna go, hey, by the way, pal, all these secrets are really bumming me out, so like, you know how _close_ your best friend Julie is with _Mister_ Kane—”

They both realize Mike’s standing there at the same time, and freeze.

Mike looks at them for a long minute, and then sighs. “I’m not a genius like you two,” he says, carefully, “but you know there’s only so long I could go without having to figure it out, right?”

“...I’m gonna get back to work,” Chuck says flatly.

“ _Coward,”_ Julie snaps. Chuck just rolls his eyes and shuts his side of the screen off.

Mike sits down again, close enough that their knees touch, but doesn’t try to hug her again. She bites her lip and looks away, shoulders hunching up, and he thinks... this definitely isn’t how he ever thought about asking her, but in a way, it’s maybe for the best. Julie’s opened up now, whether she likes it or not.

 _My dad would_ kill me _if he saw me like this._

“So...” she says. “How... how long did you...?”

“When I saw how he looked at you,” Mike says. “That day, with Genesis, when you jumped. And I thought... I thought _he actually loves her_. He does, doesn’t he?”

“Yeah,” she says, voice cracking. She squeezes her eyes shut, like she thinks he could somehow be _angry_ at her for it.

“No, no, I’m glad, Jules,” Mike hastens to assure her. “It’s okay. He _should_. But I just meant, I felt like I should ask you, that night, about it. But you just—you didn’t want me to know. And I didn’t want to know, either. It felt like... you should get to be who you said you were. Like the rest of us. We should all get to be who we want, in Motorcity.”

Julie lets out a laugh that’s so broken up, it’s mostly crying. “And now look at me,” she says, and runs her big hands through her blond hair, messing up all the pins. “God, Mike. I never wanted to hurt you, I never liked lying to you, I just—I was so _scared_. I didn’t want you to hate me.”

“I couldn’t,” Mike says immediately. “Jules, holy crap, how could I ever—?”

“Julie _Kane_ ,” she says. “I’m the heir of Kane Co, Mike. He’s training me for it. Chuck’s up there recording Dad’s _lessons_ for me so I don’t miss any. That’s how you could.”

“No,” Mike says. “ _No_. Never. I’m never going to hate you. You’re a Burner. You’re my friend. If you’re—if you’re who’s gonna run Kane Co after Kane, after _Abe_ , then, then...” it hits him, all at once.

“Then we’ve won,” he says, slowly. Tasting it, how sweet it is, how great. “We’ve already won, Jules, _you’ve_ won _everything_. We’ve just gotta back you until you get to collect.” He laughs, overwhelmed with every unfolding possibility.

“ _Oh_ ,” Julie breathes, looking intently at his face, and then his hands are on her broad shoulders and her big hands are grabbing on to his shirt and her mouth is against his, right over the laughter. He’s kissing back before he can think twice, giddy and electric, and she’s laughing too. She bowls him right over and the way she can flatten him sends a startling hot thrill all through him, makes him gasp and arch up against her hold.  

They both realize what they’re doing and come apart at about the same moment, but it’s not startled or scrambling. Just drawing back. Julie raises up above him wearing the face of his other best friend, mouth all flushed from the kissing of it, and he says, “What about Chuck,” and she says “Yeah, I know,” and he says “This isn’t fair, Jules, I don’t know how to make it fair—” and she kisses him again. Then sits up.

“God, you’re so _good_ , I want you so much,” she says, and Mike shivers just to hear something like that. He sits up, too, his head spinning.

“We gotta get you guys fixed,” he says.

“Yeah, I know. I know. Shoot! I didn’t mean to do anything like this until... until then, or, like, or ever, maybe. I just...” She gestures exasperatedly at herself. “...Impulse control.”

“Chuck’s never kissed me,” Mike says, feeling his face burn. “Like on impulse or, uh, otherwise.”

“Yeah, well,” Julie snorts. “He’s a lot better at operating this darn thing, I think we have all conclusively determined that.”

“Oh,” Mike says. “...wow. So. Uh. He... really? Chuck?”

“ _Yeah_ , Mike.” She rolls her eyes at him. “Him. And me. Us. And you. We’ve talked about it.”

“...Oh,” Mike says, faintly.

She leans forward and kisses him again, fast and intent, then breaks away. “Sorry,” she says. “Sorry. I just wanted that. I’m gonna go now. I can’t be here right now, without—uh— _okay bye!_ ”

She gets up, more clumsy than she’s been in awhile, and Mike just watches her with wide eyes as she pulls her clothes in order, runs her hand through her rumpled hair, looks at him, licks her lips, looks away, and strides off really fast.

Mike lies back down against the cool metal of the landing deck.

 _Peak weird_ , he thinks, and laughs kind of crazily.

 


	4. Chapter 4

 

“—Need more _processing power_ ,” Julie is complaining, again, for like the sixth time, pacing anxiously around the garage. “I mean magnetic resonance imagery for just the physical part of the brain is one thing, we could put one together here out of car parts, probably, but actually mapping and modifying any part of an integrated tech-hybrid consciousness requires the kind of massively parallel hardlight processes no one can just— _buy_ like from a _store,_ like that kind of stuff’s pretty exclusively reserved for R &D’s more classified divisions. So we’re back to square one, _stuck_ here—”

“Hey,” Mike says, holding a hand up. She looks at him, irritated, and goes back to pacing.

“I don’t need an inspiring speech, Mike, I need a machine that’ll run like sixty terabytes per second—”

“—Which you can get from R&D,” Mike says.

“And how am I gonna get _in_ there, Cowboy! I don’t know if you _noticed_ but like 90% of anything cool up in Deluxe has a big No Girls Allowed sign on the doors!”

“Yeah but— you don’t exactly _look_ like a girl right now, Jules,” Mike says, and Julie stops dead.

“Oh my god,” she says hoarsely. “ _Oh my god_.” She stares at her hands, _Chuck’s_ hands, and laughs incredulously. “Mike, that’s brilliant.”

“I try,” Mike smiles.  

“Well you knocked it out of the park, this time!” Julie turns on her heel and brings up a communication screen, trying to patch through to Chuck. The first few times don’t work, until Julie growls under her breath and does something that makes all her screens flash red at once. Chuck picks up two seconds later.

“What? Are you okay? Where’s the fire?” he asks breathlessly.

“There you are!” Julie says. “Okay, Mike just had a great idea—”

“You got me on an urgent line for one of Mike’s crazy schemes,” Chuck says flatly.

“Shut up. This one’s actually good!”

“Hey,” Mike says, a little hurt.

“Oh, hey, Mike, you heard that, that’s totally cool,” Chuck sighs, and rubs his forehead. “Sorry, I just— it’s been— weird, okay? It’s been weird up here. Julie, what’ve you got for me?”

“I can get into R&D,” Julie says eagerly, and bounces on her heels, throwing her arms out to either side. “I’m a dude right now! I could get a labcoat and just walk right in!”

“Ohhh,” Chuck says. “Huh! I mean— no, you couldn’t, there’s like so many security protocols—”

“—Which you can get me past, seeing as _you’re_ an executive intern, plus you pretty much grew up there, right?”

“Right, yeah, so like— Julie, people are gonna recognize you, I wasn’t, like, the most popular guy in the world but I spent years in Systems Engineering, I had friends, they’re still gonna be like, _around_.”

“Uuughfgh,” Julie grumbles. “Dang! But that’s Systems, we’re trying to get into like, the real classified Neuralware stuff!”

“It’s still a risk,” Chuck says. “Plus like, your hair’s all wrong for your age. My hair, I mean. No one’s gonna see you and think ‘oh, just some background dude, who cares’, you know? I don’t think I ever got it past my ears back in Systems. In higher-security departments everyone gets redacted _way_ more frequently.”

“I could—”

“Trim it and die,” Chuck says sternly, pointing through the screen. Julie throws her hands up in exasperation.

“Okay, okay! So then what!” she exclaims. “Can’t sneak in as a girl. Can’t sneak in as a boy. Do I just kick the door down and charge, or what? We _need_ those parts.”

“Kick the door down,” Chuck repeats quietly, then straightens up, eyes widening. “Yeah, that’s it! That’s— okay, I couldn’t do this, even on weekends, but— do your best Kane impression.”

“What?” Julie asks, and throws a sudden, furtive glance over at Mike. Mike just shrugs at her, trying to look supportive.

“C’mon. Like how he looks when he’s about to give some poor underperforming project lead a thrashing. Look like that.”

Julie grimaces, clearly uneasy, then breaths in, out, and... changes, right in front of Mike. It’s not the way Chuck puts on his persona as King of the Realm, it’s... nastier. Julie’s spine straightens, her chin goes up, her hands clasp behind her back. She regards her viewscreen with narrow-eyed contempt, cold and vicious.

“Like this, _technician_?” she sneers, her voice a low poisonous drawl, and all the hairs on the back of Mike’s arms prickle.

Through the screen, Chuck grins, and points a finger at her. “Bingo. I didn’t go to Motorcity, Jules, I transferred to Internal Investigations.”

Julie’s cold sneer melts into a wolfish, eager grin. “Oh, those poor jerks,” she breathes. She rounds on Mike, fast enough that he jumps.

“ _And what are you looking at, Chilton?”_ she barks. “ _Attention!_ ”

Mike’s at attention before he can think, heart racing, mouth dry.

“Uh!” he says. “H-hey!”

Julie paces towards him, and it’s— the wrong walk, for Chuck’s body, or even for hers, it’s a dangerous shoulders-first prowl, her hands still tucked neatly behind her back. Her smile has too many teeth, it’s _anticipatory_ , like the first wrong move Mike makes, he’s gonna _get it_ , and she prowls around him in a circle that makes the back of his neck _throb_ , somehow.

“Jules,” he says, weakly.

“I didn’t say you could speak,” she says, still that horrible low voice, and Mike swallows hard. The prickly throbbing sense of dread is spilling down his spine from his neck, now, lighting him up with nervous energy, but he doesn’t quite dare move.

Julie does another circuit around him, looking him coldly up and down. “Disgraceful,” she announces. “I hope you have a damn good explanation for your behavior, Chilton, because—”

“S— _Jules_ —”

“ _I didn’t say you could speak!”_ she snarls, suddenly in his face, all teeth and cold blue eyes, one hand fisting the collar of his jacket. He’s wrenched up onto his toes and shaken, briskly, and it rattles all the words clear out of his mouth. He hasn’t been treated like this since he was— thirteen, maybe, fourteen, it’s a shock.

“Yessir!” he gasps.

“What was that?”

“Sir!” he says again, more clearly. “Yes, sir!”

“ _Better._ ”

He’s dropped back to his feet and snaps to attention, stomach knotting anxiously. She gives him another long, searching look, then... relaxes, the overbearing sense of danger and disgust fading out of her posture. She smiles, close-mouthed and crooked, and turns back to her screen with Chuck.

“Well?” she asks him.

Chuck’s grinning. “ _Dang_ ,” he says. “That’s perfect, holy crap. If you can knock _Mike_ off his game like that, you should be able to tie a bunch of lab rats in knots.”

Belatedly, Mike eases out of attention, and runs both hands through his hair, trying to regroup.

“Uh,” he says, cautiously. “What... was that?”

“Method acting,” Julie says wryly.

“Internal Investigations is kind of the black ops, ultra-elite equivalent for the tech department,” Chuck explains. “They keep an eye on everyone else, coordinating it all and making sure no one goes off the rails and blows up half of Michigan, and you have to be like _deadly_ smart to qualify. It’s actually not all that implausible that I’d have ended up there, like, compared to running away to Motorcity and becoming a rebel hacker who fights like all of Deluxe with four dudes and some cars.”

Julie snorts at him. “Oh come on, _some_ cars,” she says. “More like _the coolest cars ever_.”

“Yeah, sure, right,” Chuck says, but more like he doesn’t care than like he actually agrees. “Anyway if I’m gonna cruise back into R&D after, you know, mysteriously disappearing like three years ago, it’s a lot better for us and anyone who ever actually knew me if I’m too scary to get asked any questions. And Julie can _really_ do scary.”

“You say the nicest things,” Julie grins.

“That’s great,” Mike says. “That’s-- guys, that’s awesome. What can I do?”

Julie’s eyes flash, and all of a sudden she’s back in his face, cold and-- yep, scary, real scary. “I don’t remember giving you permission to do _anything_ ,” she snaps, and Mike jumps back a little, trying to clear out of her range-- she shoves him, and he goes stumbling. “You disrespectful, disobedient, antisocial lowlife punk,” she goes on, pitch-perfect Kane, even with Chuck’s voice, “and your car isn’t even that cool!”

At that, the spell breaks, and Mike cracks up laughing. Julie goes to shove him again and he goes up on his toes, wraps his arms around her narrow shoulders and hugs her tightly.

“C’mon, dude, that’s too much,” he laughs. “You don’t diss a guy’s car, even if you’re being evil.”

“Okay, okay,” Julie grins, “I take it back, your car’s exactly cool enough.” She wraps her arms around his waist and he can feel that implacable, augmented strength in her muscles, how easily she could crush him. Combined with how agitated the whole evil act thing has got him, it’s-- kind of a lot, kind of thrilling. He finds himself licking his lips, eying the pale pink line of her mouth, kind of hoping--

“Hm,” she says, and ducks down to kiss him. He shivers and melts into it, completely thrilled, eager for anything she’ll let him have.

“Okay, bye,” Chuck says.

Mike jolts back and yelps “ _Hey, wait!”_

Chuck does actually wait. His face is very blank, and his small, slim hand is half-raised, hovering in the air to close the call.

“You know I like you, right?” Mike blurts out.

“...Yes,” Chuck says slowly. Calmly. Mike searches his face, Julie’s face but all wrong. It’s like a mask, white and cold and inert. He can’t tell a thing about what Chuck’s feeling, or if Chuck’s feeling anything at all.

“I like you and I wanna kiss you and be with you and stuff,” Mike says. Julie shifts in his arms, and he squeezes her tightly. “You and Julie both,” he clarifies. “Like, romantically. The same way. Both at once. Is that-- can we? She said you guys talked about maybe doing that. Can we?”

Chuck takes a slow, careful breath in, and draws his hand back. Runs it through his bangs. His eyes are dark and intent on Mike’s face, but there’s something maybe a little more present about him, like he’s coming closer to the surface of wherever it was he sank down into.

“It’s gonna be weird,” he says calmly. “While we’re like this.”

“Weird’s fine,” Mike says immediately. “Weird’s cool, dude, I don’t care. I just, I can’t-- I can’t just do this with Julie and not have you on board, it’s your body, and it’s _you_ , I want you too. _I’m_ weird. I don’t care.”

Chuck nods. “Okay,” he says. “Okay, then. Yeah. If you really-- if you’re sure, if you want-- this. Me.”

“I want you. Chuck, dude, I want you _a lot_.”

Chuck actually smiles. Just a quirk at the corners of his painted lips, but it’s like the sun coming out, it’s like hitting five hundred miles an hour, it’s like the very first bite of pizza after a hard fight. It’s perfect. Mike can hear Julie’s breath catch, because his own has too.

“Cool,” Chuck says softly. Kind of wonderingly. “Okay, cool, great, that’s--” he laughs a little, touches his mouth with thin fingers, looks away. “That’s, yeah.”  There’s a faint blush spreading across his pale cheeks. It’s incredibly cute.

“I’m gonna kiss you next time I see you, okay?” Mike says. “Like-- so it’s fair. That’s fair, right? I’m gonna kiss both of you like, just as much, and a whole bunch, it’s gonna be great.”

Chuck’s actually grinning now, raking his hand through his hair, flustered and sweet.

“Dude,” he says, squeaking a little. “Dude, jeez--”

“Julie?” someone says, from Chuck’s side of the screen. A deep voice, warm and gentle: “Julie-bear, who’re--”

Mike has just enough time to see Chuck’s face go as hard and cold as ice before one small hand flashes up and the call terminates. Julie curses in Mike’s ear and he shivers, heart slamming up against his ribs.

“That was close,” she says.

“Yeah,” he says. He doesn’t feel like kissing her anymore, but he doesn’t at all mind how tightly she’s holding him. He presses his face to her shoulder and just kinda-- hangs on.

“He’ll be okay,” she says, and pats his back. “He’s-- he’s smart. It’ll be okay. He’ll be okay. We’ll fix it.”

“And then _you’ll_ be back there,” Mike says bitterly. Julie just shrugs.

“I can handle it better than he can,” she says. “And he can-- he can do this, I guess. Be down here with you and all. We’ll figure it out. We’ll fix it.”

“We’ll fix it,” Mike echoes. It’s apparently what she needs to hear, because she sighs, kisses his forehead, and lets go.

 

*

 

Three days later, when they’ve got the whole plan ready to go, Mike insists on seeing them off. Even though Dutch and Texas are gonna be taking Julie up the last leg to Deluxe, it’s been days since Mike seen any more of Chuck than a crushingly blank look through a com screen. Chuck hasn’t smiled again, since that one call, and it’s kind of killing Mike’s heart just a little bit.

“He’s just worried,” Julie says. When she slides into Mutt’s passenger seat she grits her teeth and clenches the straps of the safety harness, obviously desperate not to freak out and already starting to lose the struggle.  She’s skipped shaving the last couple days and they’re borrowing Doc Hudson’s old Deluxe scientist clothes, white scrubs and a whole labcoat and even some old-fashioned smart-glasses. She looks really different like that, a grown-up, a stranger, tense and professional and concerned about important grown-up things. It’s great, for the plan and all, but also kind of awful and leaves Mike just permanently wanting to call the whole thing off.

Mike takes the drive slow, for once. There’s plenty of time, and none of them need Julie any more rattled than she already is, for this. She glares at him sidelong, as he drives, and at the speed readout that never rises above 150, but she doesn’t call him on it. She also doesn’t scream, faint, or try to grab the wheel, so it’s a victory for everyone, really.   

Chuck’s waiting for them at the usual access pipe, fussing with some holograms.

“Hey, dude,” Mike says uncertainly, walking up with Julie. “How... how’s it going?”

“Fine,” Chuck says flatly.

“ _Chuck_ ,” Julie says. They stare at each other for a long, tense minute, and then Chuck sighs, shoulders slumping, and bites his lip.

“I’m worried,” he says. “This sucks. Everything sucks.”

“ _Thank_ you,” Julie says. She crosses her arms and jerks her head towards Mike. “Anything else?”

Chuck grimaces, runs his hands through his hair, turns away, then turns back sharply. In two strides he comes over to Mike, grabs the collar of his jacket, and goes up on his toes to kiss him.

“ _Woo!”_ Dutch calls out the window of his car, like the CEO of Jerk Co. “Get ‘im!”

Chuck’s already pulling away from him, locking down after just that one quick press of lips.

Mike says, “ _No_ , dude,” frustrated and wanting, and pulls him in closer. He’s so small like this. It’s easy. He leans down and kisses Chuck as hard as Julie kisses him, because that’s what’s fair, and because he really, really wants to. Chuck’s body is always heavy and burning-hot, rough-jawed and strong enough to overwhelm him. Julie’s body in his arms is an almost total contrast: sharp and light and soft-skinned, long hair everywhere, mouth cool and startled. Yielding, inviting, something tender and easy to handle. Mike wants both of them so much and it feels like he can finally have them and he’s not letting that go with just a quick little anxious peck.

By the time he lets Chuck back down he’s breathing hard, making a devastating soft whimper, and one of his hands is clenched tightly in Mike’s hair. It feels amazing. Everything’s amazing right now. Mike glances over to where Julie’s watching them, her face flushed and her eyes wide and dark, and grins.

“I’ll see you guys later,” he says. “Right?”

“Uh. Yeah. Right,” Chuck says, touching his mouth with his fingertips. “...You got it.”

“I am going to _destroy you_ sometime,” Julie says solemnly, and punches Mike's shoulder. “Okay, let’s go, Chuck, we got a schedule!”

“Right,” Chuck says again. He lets go of Mike’s hair slowly, and takes a step back. Then he bounces forward, gives Mike a final, _unfairly_ cute kiss on the side of his jaw, and dashes after Julie, his face ducked down behind the fall of her long red hair.

 

*

 

Texas and Dutch peel off to alternate access ways up to Deluxe, and Mike heads back to the ruins this whole mess got started in. With no one else around he floors it, driving as fast as he wants, the world whipping past him on the knife’s edge of too fast to respond to, all the thought and calculation of steering stripped down to the iron bones of instinct. It’s nothing like flying, it’s better.

The ruins are a series of crumbling steppes and drop-offs, hundreds of years of Detroit history cracked open all the way down to some ancient, prehistoric core. Mike gets out the long, tough coil of cable and a couple climbing hooks from Mutt’s trunk, tucks the skull of his spark staff into his jacket pocket, and starts climbing down.

They hadn’t gone all that far down, initially, but they’d dropped further when the explosion had turned too many floors into burnt cheese, and neither Julie nor Chuck could manage climbing back up the rope. Now Mike drops easily through the charred, shook-up levels, peering carefully into the darkness for a glint of light, a stray reflection, some hint of old machinery.

“Mike, we’re in place,” Julie says, her chatbox popping up by his ear rather than a full screen. “Everything’s going great. But god, the production labs here are amazing, some of the facilities— if I could get my hands on them for a week— a _day_ —”

“You’re going to own all of them, eventually,” Mike points out. “You can do whatever you want with them then.” He lands on a floor somewhere and opens a handlight to look around. “But for now, stay focused. Do you know what I’m actually _looking_ for?”

“Right. Yeah. Chuck’s diverted the processing directive of one of the ultrabanks for our best analysis program and we’re getting a pretty good map of what it... what it was like, _when_ it was where... we need you to be. Argh, that’s complicated. Anyway I’m getting by chatbox relay that your spatial coordinates are at—” and she rattles off a list of numbers. Mike checks his coordinates and confirms she’s correct. “—Cool. Go forward about ten meters.”

“There’s a wall,” Mike has to report after six.

“Cut through it. Should be a room on the other side.”

Once Mike’s carved his way through with the spark staff, he follows directions through the room, down some stairs, through another wall, up some stairs, and into a room with—

“I think there’s old computers here!” Mike says, enthused. “...Well, or someone really liked to make boxes with screens in them.”

“Great! Tell me you have the relay transmitter with you.”

“Was that the little white thing you gave me?”

“ _Yes_.”

“Iiiiii... left it... in my pocket right here, I got it.”

“Mike!” she scolds him, but he can tell she’s smiling. “Don’t scare me like that, I can’t flip my lid up here!”

“You’re doing fine. Okay, I just jam this in?”

“Yeah, the rectangle should plug in somewhere. Check the back of the boxes. They might be marked ‘USB’.”

“It’s in.”

The computers start to flicker and light up, one by one, and Julie laughs triumphantly in his ear. “We got it! We got it, Chuck, hey—” she flickers out for a minute, then comes back. “—Okay, we’ve got the data, he’s looking right at it, everything’s decrypting— decryp _ted_ , _heck_ yeah. Now we just— _what?”_ She flickers out for a much longer and more nervewracking minute. “Mike, call the guys in from decoy duty, _now_. We need to destroy this floor.”

“ _What?”_ Mike asks. “Why!?”

“If Kane gets ahold of this data— if— if he, he can’t, he can’t— it’s— _Chuck, help—_ ” there’s a really, really horrible long pause. She makes contact again, sounding agonizingly close to wrecked, her voice hoarse and trembling with strain. “We’re going to have to melt this ultrabank down to slag as soon as possible and that won’t happen until temperatures of thirteen hundred celsius. Tell Texas to get all of Stronghorn’s guns up and charging. _You_ need to get your spark staff into every single computer you find down there. Blow it all up, _everything_. Collapse the whole complex if you can. Chuck and I are running, _now_. _NOW, CHUCK_.”

She disconnects a final time. Mike swallows, hard, and calls up Dutch and Texas to let them know the new development. Then he draws his staff, an unfamiliar cold dread running down his spine, and starts methodically chopping all the little plastic and glass boxes into bits.

 

*

 

When he gets back, he finds Julie and Chuck pacing around on the landing and shouting at each other, and Texas sitting at the bar with a wary expression. The scratches on his face are still a vivid pink, and he doesn’t seem too eager to get in anyone’s way.

“The gi— the _geeks_ are all excited about junk,” Texas tells him. “Like apparently the science stuff we got was _way_ evil and they had to call in Big Texas to save ‘em from it _and I did_ but they’re not even happy about it.” He frowns, hesitating, then bursts out plaintively, “It was a _really super mega awesome_ explosion and no one’s even said _thanks!_ ”

“Thanks, Big Guy,” Mike says, and pats his shoulder. “You saved the day again.” Texas looks mollified.   

“So, what’s going on?” Mike asks them, and then has to stifle the urge to jump behind the bar when the two of them round on him together.

“Julie lost her freakin’ head in there and totally—”

“If Kane had gotten ahold of that data—”

“It was totally unnecessary, I could have wiped—”

“Ultrabanks backup to remote servers, Chuck, we didn’t have time—”

“You could have _trusted me!_ ”

"Even a _hint_ that _anything_ like that existed—”

“You panicked, Julie, you blew it! All that equipment we’re never going to—”

“We can put something together down here!”

“You wanna stick your head under Mutt’s hood and have Mike slam it down, go for it!”

“ _HEY_ ,” Mike says, and waves his arms. “GUYS. TAKE A MINUTE.”

They break off, red-faced and panting, Julie looming over Chuck, who’s got one small fist in her shirt and another one balled up warningly by his side. Chuck lets go and takes a few steps back, dragging his fingers through his long hair, and Julie straightens up, crossing her arms.

“Julie. What was up with the data that’s got you so spooked you had Texas blow up a whole floor of Kane’s science junk?”

“It’s the software to run a machine for the transfer of living consciousnesses,” Julie says.

“Software we don’t have the _hardware_ for, anymore,” Chuck puts in sourly.

“We can reverse engineer it,” Julie says. “We’ve built cars, and this stuff is from around then, anyway. It’s too important to make sure that no one beyond us ever figures out anything like this is actually possible. The original project got shut down before they had a single successful transfer— it _wasn’t_ possible, back then, and someone smart didn’t want it to _ever_ be.”

“But it is now? How?”

Julie spreads her arms and dozens of Chuck’s screens bloom in the air around her, multicolored and pulsing. “Neuraltech. Our brains are wired up and interconnected in ways they couldn’t have been before integrated hardlight biosystems. Especially the brains of people like me and Chuck. I’m not as extensively upgraded as him, but—”

“—You _could_ have been if you hadn’t blown up the Neuraltech department and we’d loaded one of the implantation rigs to go,” Chuck growls. “We could be _done_ by now, but you panicked!”

Mike tilts his head at Julie. “Did you?” he says mildly. He doesn’t think she did. Chuck’s vicious, blustering anger seems more about his own issues than Julie’s.

“No,” Julie says, chin raised. “I know I’m not as in control as Chuck would be but I made the best decision I could with the information I had. Mike, if Kane knew consciousness transfer was possible, he could become functionally immortal. He could load himself into a new body when he gets old.”

“...Oh,” Chuck says softly. He takes a few steps over to the bar and sits down hard. “...Oh man.”

Julie nods, vindicated.

“Yeah, _oh_ ,” she says. “The initial project seemed to assume that cloning would make it more ethical, but I _know_ Kane Co doesn’t have that tech, and isn’t going to invent it within the next twenty years. What it does have, right now, is a whole lot of fit and healthy young men that would give their lives for Mister Kane.” She gives Mike a bitter, ironic glance. “ _Literally._ ”

Mike sits down hard. He doesn’t make it to the bar.

“Jules,” he says hoarsely. “Did you blow up _enough_ floors?”

“I really freakin hope so,” she says.

 

*

 

Mike and Texas are laying out spare car chassis parts for the homebrew implantation rig later that night when Chuck makes an _awful_ noise from the back stockroom. Mike’s dropped half a fender and is racing for the doorway before it entirely finishes registering, and when it does it just makes what he finds worse: Chuck doubled over on himself, whining with pain. Texas catches up in the next second.

“What happened?” Mike demands.

“—who’s attacking?” Texas asks.

“I’m— hn _nn_ ,” Chuck tries to pull himself up and can’t, flinches over even smaller. “No one, it’s okay, it’s cool. _Ah!”_

Mike grabs him, and almost drops him when it makes him scream. In Julie’s voice, the sound’s pretty much unbearable, and Texas is hovering close to both of them, practically frantic.

“I’m okay, I’m okay, make Texas clear out, I’m fine,” Chuck pants, voice tight.

“You’re hurt,” Mike says. “What’s going on?”

“I’m _FINE_ ,” Chuck snaps, “ _MAKE TEXAS LEAVE_.”

“...oh my gosh it’s lady problems,” Texas says.

“Texas!” Mike snaps. “Hey, we talked about this!”

Texas throws up his hands. “Little man, we did _not_ have _no_ talks about menstruation! That _is too_ a lady problem!”

“ _WHAT_ ,” Chuck yells. He tries to straighten up again and chokes back another scream.

“Big Daddy Texas _knows_ his science junk,” Texas says. “And his junk science. He has been fully educated on the miracles of life. _Hwa-tcha!_ ”

“This isn’t that,” Chuck says. “Also please never say any of those words again.”

“I am an education _machine_ ,” Texas says. “Hey, now that you’re kissin’ on Mike an’ all—”

“I tried to pick up an engine block without thinking and tore something up in my back because Julie’s upper body strength is like zero and if _either of you_ tell her that, _SHE WILL KILL ALL OF US_.”

Mike and Texas consider this.

“Agreed,” Texas says.

“Okay yeah,” Mike says. “Uh, can I carry you to a chair or something?”

Chuck nods carefully, and Mike picks him up even more carefully. He makes tiny _ow ow ow_ noises with every step, and it feels like it takes forever to get to just the nearest garage bench.

“Is this okay?” he asks.

“Yeah, just put me down,” Chuck says. Texas hastily shoves all the wrenches and rags and stuff onto the floor and Mike lowers him, really super extra carefully, onto his side.

“I think you’re gonna have to straighten out, dude,” he says.

“Yeah. I— yeah, okay, yeah. Okay. Hhhhnn _no, aah!_ ”

“Hold on. Maybe I can...” Mike kneels down, awkwardly, and runs his hand down the narrow column of Chuck’s current spine. “...Is there something I can like, adjust?”

“I don’t know. Probably. It’s like halfway up, try rubbing it? Maybe I just, I don’t know, just pulled a muscle, that’d be great, _crap_ what if I broke her _spine_.”

“I don’t think you could move your legs if that happened,” Mike says. He starts kneading along Chuck’s back, trying to get a feel for how the thin muscle lies over bone, and not to be distracted by how _insubstantial_ this body feels in his hands, like he could crush it by accident. He’s had nightmares of sinking his fingers right through Julie on accident, her small bones coming apart in midair. But Chuck’s ragged breathing is starting to deepen, and when Mike finds some bunched-up place under his shoulder, he makes a soft little noise and presses into Mike’s touch.

“There,” he says unsteadily. “Yeah, Mike, do that, that’s— _nnhAH, ahh_ , fuck.”

“Do you think a cold pack or a hot one might help?” Mike asks.

“I dunno,” Chuck says tightly. “Nnnh, m-maybe both?”

Mike glances up at Texas. “Can you rustle that up, Big Guy?” he asks.

“On it,” Texas says, grateful for a mission, and dashes off.

Mike works on kneading up and down Chuck’s curled back, trying to feel out the problem, and slowly he starts to straighten out.

“Better?” he asks.

“A little. Hold on—nnhah, aah, jeez.” Chuck forces himself to roll onto his stomach in one sharp, painful-looking motion, and clutches at the sides of the bench. “ _Wow_ okay, okay, that’s— aaah, that’s okay, I can handle this.”

“You’re doing great,” Mike says. “You must have just strained something, I don’t think anything’s really broken.”

“Sure feels broken,” Chuck grumbles. “A freakin’ _engine block_ , I mean, really! What was I thinking! That thing is like three times heavier than probably my whole body right now.”

Mike smooths all of Chuck’s long hair over one shoulder. It still gets everywhere when he’s not paying attention.

“Y’know,” he says, “Julie’s bonked her head off like, everything around base it’s possible to walk into, and a lot of stuff I didn’t even know anyone could?”

“...Yeah,” Chuck admits, sounding grumpy. “I saw her hit her head on the fridge this evening, too.”

“She’s hit her head on the fridge _every_ morning. Dutch put a strip of caution tape there and she got mad, but like, she’s still doing it.”

This earns him a cracked little laugh. “Yeah. And tripping over like, everything. I don’t even trip over that much stuff!”

“I don’t think she even needs stuff to trip on. She was just standing somewhere yesterday and then fell over.”

Chuck laughs again, then breaks off. “Jeez, I shouldn’t be making fun of her, though. I tried to climb a shelf the other day ‘cuz I couldn’t reach and totally pulled it over on myself. That’s pretty much as bad as you can get.”

“I never heard about that!”

“Well I wasn’t gonna tell anyone!”

Mike snickers and runs his hands down Chuck’s back again, then carefully rubs his way back up. Chuck subsides against the bench with a soft huff when Mike gets to his neck.

“Feels... yeah, that feels better,” he murmurs. “‘S going. Um. Better...”

“Awesome.” Mike works on him for awhile more, pleased with himself and increasingly confident he’s not gonna snap a rib or anything. The small body’s warming up under his hands, relaxing, Chuck’s hands folded under the side of his face. The third time Mike works his way down to his lower back, Chuck shifts, makes a soft, breathy little noise, and Mike realizes his fingers are awfully close to where his shirt ends, he could probably touch his bare skin, and also really wants to. He strokes his thumb along the narrow line of exposed, pale skin, just to see what happens, and what happens is Chuck makes an incredibly pretty noise, and shivers.

“...Was that okay?” Mike asks, and, uh, wow, his voice got kinda rough.

“Yeah,” Chuck says. “I— yeah, it was. Um. Fine.”

Mike pushes his fingertips up under Chuck’s shirt, really carefully, rubbing his back like before but this time enjoying how soft he is to touch, and the way his breath goes all ragged and faltering again, but not with pain.

“ _Mike,_ ” Chuck finally says, and Mike freezes up.

“Uh,” he says.

“Can you— I— can you just— come here a sec,” Chuck says, finally opening his eyes, and Mike does, eagerly. He gets kissed as soon as he comes in range, and it’s _awesome_ , and so is the way he left a hand under Chuck’s shirt and when Chuck goes up on one elbow he turns just enough that Mike’s fingers are skimming the soft swell of one of his— of Julie’s— of a breast. Chuck gasps into Mike’s mouth and doesn’t pull away. He kisses him a whole lot harder, actually. Everything is _amazing._

Mike had been under the impression that no one was allowed to touch a girl’s boobs ever, but Chuck seems to disagree, and Mike doesn’t intend to argue. Breasts are soft and squishy and really different from what Chuck’s regular body has up top and when Mike runs his thumb carefully over a nipple he can feel it tighten. Chuck gasps into his mouth and tries to sit up, then has to break off with a pained whine.

“Ahh, fuck, my back—”

“Here, it’s okay, easy,” Mike says, and helps Chuck roll over, so he’s got his back flat against the bench and Mike can just lean down and kiss him easy as anything, his hand still unapologetically up Chuck shirt. Chuck makes the best noises while Mike plays with his breasts, soft little whimpers and half-swallowed curses, squirming and shivering up against his hand until Mike is so turned on he feels like he might actually die, but in a great way.

“Can we— can I— uh—” Mike moves his free hand down, tugs on the waistband of Chuck’s jeans.

“Nnnh, _shit_ ,” Chuck mumbles, and his hips hitch up against Mike’s fingers. “Dude. No. I wanna but no.”

Mike groans, frustrated, and squeezes Chuck’s thigh. He doesn’t want to be a jerk about this, he just _wants him_ so much, all of him, _any_ of him, as much as he can get.

“Please?” he asks. “If you _wanna_ —”

Chuck makes an amazing little moan, but shakes his head anyway. “This is all Julie’s, man, I can’t— I can’t _give_ you what’s hers—”

“Oh,” Mike realizes. “Yeah, okay. Okay. That’s— fair. Okay.” A last hopeful flicker compels him to suggest, “We could go get her and ask if—?”

“No oh my god _don’t you dare!_ ” Chuck makes as if to sit up again and has to drop flat with another pained groan. Mike laughs, despite himself, and tugs Chuck’s shirt back down.

“Alright, buddy, I got you,” he says. “You’re kinda busted up already, anyway.”

“Yeah,” Chuck sighs. “Jeez, she’s gonna be mad.”

“She’s gonna think it’s _funny_ ,” Mike corrects. “You keep getting on her about taking care of _your_ body, and—”

“—and then I go wreck hers on accident. Man. Typical.” Chuck’s rueful look has shifted into something darker, angrier. “I can’t even drive a _girl_ without crashing.”

Mike snorts, leans down and kisses him again. “You’re doing fine, buddy,” he says. “It’s just a bump in the road.”

Chuck gives him a stern look, which is a lot less effective than either his or Julie’s usual, with his mouth all kiss-smudged and his cheeks still flushed.

“A fender-bender,” Mike says, grinning. “A _ding_.”

“You’re a ding!” Chuck shoots back, but he’s smiling too.

“You’re _both_ dings,” Texas interjects from the doorway, and they both jump. “And you spend like _way_ too much time swappin’ spit. Here’s your fix-it stuff, so don’t go around sayin’ Big Texas never did anything for ya.” He tosses them across the room, apparently reluctant to get any closer than necessary, then clears out fast. Mike collects the scattered chemical packs, then helps Chuck turn back over and lays an activated heat pad against his shoulder.

“This gonna work?” he asks.

“Mm. Let’s hope.” Chuck helps him arrange the rest in front of him on the bench. “You can get back to the garage, I think I just gotta wait this out for awhile.”

“Yeah, okay. But I think I’m gonna, uh, take a shower first,” Mike says, adjusting himself in his pants, and enjoys the way Chuck blushes even further.

“Mikey, oh my god,” he hisses.

“What?” he asks, grinning. “I just think I got kinda dirty down here, is all.”

“ _Mike_!”

Mike leans in and presses a quick, triumphant kiss to Chuck’s bright pink cheek, then strolls off, extremely pleased with just about everything.


End file.
